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Faubourg Treme: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans Movie Review

By Prairie Miller

It's unfortunate but true that much of US history taught in schools is often more about what's missing - buried or ignored - than the tidier and more cheerful offerings. And it has become increasingly the role of filmmakers to excavate that history and bring it back to life and it's rightful legacy in the scheme of things. And this couldn't be more true of the extraordinary documentary, Faubourg Tremé: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans.

Co-directed by Dawn Logsdon and screenwriter Lolis Eric Elie, and executive produced by Wynton Marsalis and Stanley Nelson, Fauberg Tremé is an astonishing excursion down memory lane, of that historic and tragic New Orleans neighborhood. And that history as we discover, about a whole lot more than just the birthplace of jazz, though the role of America's own classical music is at the cultural core of this exhaustive and eloquent inquiry.

Co-director and Times Picayune columnist Elie serves as peripatetic narrator, both tour guide and time traveler as he frames this documentary around two evolving events: Elie's expectation-defying relocation back to this impoverished, crime ridden neighborhood where he is renovating a dilapidated but history-rich house with the help of seventy-five year old Creole carpenter and a kind of local captivating griot storyteller, Irving Trevigne. And later, the horrors visited upon the area, both physical and political, when Hurricane Katrina sweeps into the area.

Elie's persistent socio-political curiosity, solemn and lyrical reflections, and profound understanding and affection for a New Orleans that has informed who he has become and his beliefs and aspirations, make this unique and passionate documentary essential viewing. Among the vividly conveyed revelations through long forgotten chronicles and striking artwork, is that the politically enlightened Faubourg Tremé was the staging area of the largest slave revolt in this country. Also, that black residents back then, even as slaves, struggled for and won significant concessions, such as the right to earn wages and receive an education.

And later, this birthplace of the civil rights movement and revolutionary ideals saw a battle for the end to segregation in transportation, one hundred years before Rosa Parks. On the other hand, Faubourg Tremé's Homer Plessy case to advance integration, Plessy vs. Ferguson, when it was defeated in the US Supreme Court, led tragically to the inauguration and institutionalization of the infamous 'separate but equal' Jim Crow laws across the South.

And throughout Fauberg Tremé, the magical musical revelry and roots of jazz serve as a clarion of freedom and hope, even in demoralizing times, and a mass cultural unity conferring strength and resolve. And all these resurrected moments of New Orleans history in the film ultimately lend consciousness and purpose gleaned from the illuminated past, and resonant with a visionary future.

Faubourg Tremé: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans is currently being screened at the Tribeca Film Festival in NYC, and more information is at: Tribecafilmfestival.org. The documentary will then premiere in May at the Sundance Cinemas Kabuki, as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival (Sfiff.org). And more information, including details about the DVD release of Faubourg Tremé, is online at: Tremedoc.com.

Serendipity Films
4 stars