Mine was the December 2009 selection of
Film Movement Canada, a subscription service that brings the best of independent cinema to your door each month. Though it’s only recently launched here,
Film Movement has operated in the US for several years, and has long been one of my favourite sources of great films.
Mine is screening theatrically around the US until the end of March 2010 (
more information) and will be available through iTunes this month, too.
Mine (Director: Geralyn Pezanoski): Winner of the Audience Award at the 2009 SXSW Film Festival, Mine is a gut-wrenching look at some of the forgotten victims of 2005’s Hurricane Katrina: pets and their owners. My wife and I are thinking of becoming dog owners, and after watching this film, I’m more convinced than ever that pets really do become part of the family.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, thousands of evacuees were forced to leave their cats and dogs behind. Shelters wouldn’t accept animals, and in some cases, people left their pets thinking they’d be gone just a few days. We all know what happened. Many people still haven’t returned to the city, and those who did had to wait months. In the meantime, more than 150,000 animals died. Thanks to the efforts of volunteers, several thousand were rescued, but many were shipped to other states, and when their owners didn’t claim them within a few days, some were adopted out to new families. This is where the film gets really interesting.
The failure of the government to adequately respond to the catastrophe has been the subject of many fine documentary films, but in this case, ordinary people around the country stepped in to do all they could to rescue these pets who’d been left behind. Unfortunately, there is a political edge to some of these “rescue” organizations, as some of the former owners soon found out. For instance, many dog owners in New Orleans don’t have their dogs spayed or neutered, whether for financial or cultural reasons. Among the rescue community, this is considered irresponsible. As well, many of the rescued animals turned out to have heartworm infections, something that can be prevented with medication. Again, probably due to financial hardship or simply ignorance, many New Orleans residents hadn’t treated their pets for heartworm.
The end result was that many of the rescue organizations saw the original owners as negligent, and after treating the animals for sickness, they would spay or neuter them and then adopt them out to more “suitable” families in their areas. When the original owners were finally able to track their pets down, the rescue organizations would tell them that their pet had a new family, and the new family didn’t want to give it up.
We follow several of these heartbreaking custody battles throughout the course of the film. Though it’s only hinted at, race and class are central to how the stories are played out. Since pets are considered property under the law, it should simply be a matter of having one’s property returned, but in the emotional battlefield of pet ownership, things are rarely that simple. Having already survived the hurricane and the loss of their homes and possessions, the residents of New Orleans have no money to hire lawyers to pursue their missing pets, so a number of volunteers help them to find lawyers who are willing to work pro bono on the cases. It’s an ugly process, and one particular phone conversation (part of which appears in the trailer embedded below) between the owner of a missing dog and the head of the rescue organization who got him out of New Orleans sums up the film in a nutshell. People who love animals can often forget that there is a person attached to that animal. If you care about animals, you cannot pretend that that relationship never existed.
You don’t have to be a dog lover to enjoy Mine. And even if you think you’ve seen all there is to see about Hurricane Katrina, don’t let that keep you away from this insightful film, which has exposed the class divisions of our society more clearly than anything I’ve seen in a long time.
Official site of the film
(8/10)
Tagged as:
class,
hurricanekatrina,
pets,
race
Editor’s Note:
Doc Soup is a monthly documentary screening programme run by the good folks at
Hot Docs. It gives audiences in Toronto (and now Calgary and Vancouver!) their regular doc fix each year from the fall through to the spring, leading up to the Hot Docs festival itself.
Trouble the Water (2008, Directors: Carl Deal and Tia Lessin): Hurricane Katrina devastated the city of New Orleans and much of the Gulf Coast more than three years ago now, but many of the city’s most impoverished neighbourhoods have yet to be rebuilt. Kimberley Rivers Roberts and her husband Scott Roberts lived in the Lower Ninth Ward, and documented the hurricane’s impact with a cheap video camera they had purchased “on the street” for $20. When directors Deal and Lessin’s planned film about the return of National Guard troops from Iraq to New Orleans fell through, they found themselves talking to evacuees looking for another angle on the tragedy. Kimberley and Scott offered not only their footage, but themselves as subjects. Mixing the shaky and low-quality Hi-8 stuff shot by Kimberley and her friends and family during the storm with news footage and newly-shot material, the directors have assembled a devastating indictment of government indifference and incompetence in the face of a large-scale disaster. But due entirely to the incredible strength of character on display from this young husband and wife, the film emerges even more as a record of ordinary people discovering courage and decency they didn’t even know they possessed.
Before Katrina, Kimberley and Scott got by by dealing drugs in their neighbourhood, and so they surprise not only the audience but themselves by emerging as genuine heroes during the storm, rescuing, sheltering and finally evacuating a group of more than 25 people, all of whom had no way to evacuate before the hurricane hit. This heroism emerges precisely because the residents of this part of the country knew, even before Katrina, that they would have to take care of each other, that no government was going to do anything for them. One of the film’s most powerful moments comes after Kimberley recovers a CD she recorded as an aspiring rapper. As she sings along to the track, we can almost see the depths of both pain and determination that have sustained her from well before this latest calamity. She’s a survivor and a fighter, and a particularly good representative of the sort of people that have always been marginalized by the larger society. She and Scott call themselves “born hustlers” and that’s helped them to survive. Even the canny way that they enlisted the filmmakers to not only tell their story, but to help them rise above it, is a testament to their street smarts.
The bright side of the tragedy for them was that they realized their lives pre-Katrina were going nowhere. Seeing that they were capable of much more, they’ve been able to turn things around. Kimberley’s music career is progressing, and Scott is learning the construction trades as he helps rebuild houses in his own neighbourhood.
If there are any flaws in this film, they’d be relatively minor. The quality of the Roberts’ footage, obviously, isn’t great. As well, their accents and dialect had many in the post-screening Q&A begging for subtitles. Finally, the editing together of so many different sources creates a slightly confusing timeline. But as a document of both a great tragedy and a personal resurrection, Trouble the Water is pretty powerful.
UPDATE: The film will be released theatrically in Toronto in January 2009, and is being distributed by E1 Films.
Official site of the film
Trailer
Born Hustler Records
Here is the Q&A with directors Carl Deal and Tia Lessin from after the screening:
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Duration: 25:55
(8/10)
Tagged as:
hurricanekatrina,
neworleans
