LOCAL FILM MAKERS’ KATRINA WORK AT RICE MEDIA CENTER, AUGUST 17

Just weeks after Hurricane Katrina struck, John Sullivan of the Sealy Center for Public Health and Medicine and Bryan Parras of Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services were sent to Louisiana to meet with community leaders to find out how the National Institute for Environmental Health could collaborate with local groups. Their fact-finding journey took them from Baton Rouge, through Orleans, St. Bernard, Jefferson, Lafourche, and Terrebonne parishes, and to the city of New Iberia.

Their “day job,” asking about the damage sustained, the significant threat to human health in the area, and what environmental health projects are thought most important, ended with a report presented to the NIEH director’s conference in November.

However, Sullivan says, “The flood of fact and feeling we got back from our collaborators refused to stay inside the neat little box of our original purpose. From the moment we arrived in Baton Rouge we realized that the magnitude of the human and ecological damage demanded something more intimate and less formal, something grounded in fact but which also opened a window into how it really feels to live in the middle of an eco-catastrophe.”

So Sullivan and Parras took the videos of their interviews and pieced them together with music, still pictures, and color commentary from locals, into a film entitled . . . after the wind, child, after the waters gone. . .

Sullivan says the people in the film hope to promote “understanding and empathy with the plight of coastal Louisiana, home of so much of our energy industry infrastructure, a nexus of ongoing struggles by African-American, Houma, and Cajun communities for basic environmental, social and cultural justice, the most bountiful and endangered estuarine fishery in the Lower 48, way-station for innumerable species of migratory birds, and the cradle of so much of our national culture.”

The film will be shown at Rice Media Center on Thursday, August 17, at 8 pm. The Media Center is at University at Stockton on the south side of Rice University, 6100 Main Street. For more information, contact josulliv@utmb.edu.