FAUBOURG TREME: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans

Faubourg Tremeé: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans

A NEW DOCUMENTARY FINALLY CAPTURES THE REAL NEW ORLEANS ON FILM
Flat-out brilliant, richer and far more nuanced than Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke.

By J.B. Borders
New Orleans Tribune
October 2007

Faubourg Tremeé: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans is a video documentary about the fabled neighborhood in New Orleans which birthed so much of America's unique culture and freedom-struggle politics. But that's only part of the picture. The film also deals with the way Hurricane Katrina walloped New Orleans and the impact that devastation has had on Tremé's houses, families and the community's will to recover.

This is a great piece of storytelling, filmmaking and testifying. It is also, arguably, the most poignant film ever made about New Orleans.

In 67 brief minutes, the documentary covers nearly three hundred years of Tremé's history and legacy using archival photos and early film footage, contemporary video, family films and photographs, historical reenactments, a killer soundtrack, and spot-on observations from noted scholars, artists, laborers and community folk. This is a rich brew of ingredients expertly stirred, prepared and presented by filmmakers Dawn Logsdon and Lolis Eric Elie, two highly skilled and conscientious native New Orleanians....
...The film's executive producers are Wynton Marsalis, Pultizer Prize-winning composer and trumpeter, and filmmaker Stanley Nelson, a MacArthur Foundation "genius award" recipient whose work includes The Murder of Emmett Till, The Black Press: Soldiers Without Swords, and Two Dollars and a Dream: The Story of Madame C.J. Walker.

With a team this strong, the final product could have been long-winded and ponderous. Instead, Faubourg Tremeé: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans is an engrossing journey of individual and communal discovery, growth, triumph, defeat, destruction, resolve and beauty. *The narrative spine of the film concerns Elie's quest to renovate a home he has bought in Tremé. In the process, he finds out about the neighborhood's traditions and history, a history long-suppressed or ignored in the mass media.

Elie's general contractor, a septuagenarian master-craftsman named Irving Trevigne, turns out to be the grand-nephew of Paul Trevigne, the crusading editor of the original New Orleans Tribune, which became the nation's first black-owned daily newspaper in 1864. Trevigne was part of a larger group of progressive New Orleanians who fought for equal citizenship for blacks and people of color throughout the nineteenth century. Their writings and political tactics laid the foundation for the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

Some of the other experts helping to fill in the story of Tremé's significance are noted historians John Hope Franklin, Eric Foner and Keith Weldon Medley. Father Jerome LeDoux, former pastor of St. Augustine's Roman Catholic Church, writer Kalamu ya Salaam, musician Bob French and actor Lenwood Sloan also chime in with cogent observations.

In addition to Irving Trevigne, two of the most touching commentators Elie interviews are Brenda Marie Osbey, poet laureate of Louisiana, and trombonist Glen David Andrews. They represent two facets of human development in Tremé: one with generations of formal education behind her, the other with schooling in the hardscrabble streets of the city; both with an abiding love for and unseverable connection to the culture of New Orleans.

Andrews and Osbey are both frank and emotionally honest on camera. Moreover, their reactions to post-Katrina Tremé are emblematic of the two leading trains of thought regarding black New Orleans's future prospects. One is dazed and pessimistic; the other is soberly optimistic.

And that's the way things now stand. Recovery is underway but it is happening much more slowly than it should. Confusion and helplessness are nearly as rampant as new levels of community organization, advocacy and self-determination.

On the other hand, as this film makes crystal clear, the people of Tremé and New Orleans have endured tragedy before and are too beautiful and creative to be depressed for long. And if history is to be any guide, out of these recent misfortunes will emerge something culturally spectacular, something to rival the Negro Spirituals, blues, jazz and funk. Local musicians, writers and visual artists are already spewing out new creations that may spread across the globe in years to come.

Perhaps Faubourg Tremeé: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans is the first of the new film masterpieces to emerge from this cauldron of suffering. It has certainly raised the bar extremely high. It is richer and far more nuanced than Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke and much more accurate than the post-Katrina documentaries produced by many of the national and international news organizations, despite their well-meaning intentions.

... if I didn't think this project was exceptional, if I didn't think the work was flat-out brilliant, if it didn't hear our silences and nonverbal gestures so clearly, if it wasn't pitch perfect and visually stunning, I would not recommend it so enthusiastically.

Faubourg Tremeé is scheduled to have a preview screening at this year's New Orleans Film Festival and a series of local screenings at various venues through the end of the year. It is also tentatively scheduled to air on PBS sometime in 2008. But do yourself a favor. Don't wait until then. See it as soon as you can. It will make you smile and cry and fall in love with New Orleans all over again.

Some of us need that now more than ever.