The following LEH-funded videos, still in production at press time, will be available within the two-year duration of this catalog.

*Jewish New Orleans
Video: DVD, color; 60 minutes
An addition to the successful series on the cultural and ethnic groups of New Orleans, the film traces the history of the city’s Jewish community from the arrival of Isaac Monsanto, the first known Jew to arrive in New Orleans, who came from the Caribbean in 1757. Exploring Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform Judaism in New Orleans, this documentary also discusses Jews’ crucial roles in the political, commercial, and artistic life of the city up to the present day, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
Expected release date: Spring 2007
Producer: Terri Landry/WYES-TV

*Mon Cher Camarade
Video: DVD, color; 60 minutes
Native American “Code Talkers” are now seen as a vital part of the American effort in World War II, because they were able to relay vital information to each other in their own languages, which were indecipherable to Japanese code-breakers.  Ignored until now have been the contributions of Cajuns, who used their French to work with the French resistance movement against the Germans and garner valuable intelligence from local people as the American army pushed toward Berlin.  Using new interviews, the film traces the careers of several Cajuns in the European theater, discussing both the ways they used their French in the military and the fact that many of them were learning English for the first time, as they left their Cajun enclaves to enter the armed forces.
Expected release date: December 2006
Producer/Director: Pat Mire/LPB

*Reconstructing Creole
Video: DVD, color; 60 minutes
In the summer of 2004, an electrical fire seriously damaged Laura Plantation in Vacherie, leaving behind only the original Creole structure of the house. This film weaves together the story of Laura, named for plantation daughter Laura Lecoul Gore, who grew up on the estate, which was run by her mother and grandmother, with the stories of those rebuilding the house she lived in.  Laura’s nineteenth-century story leads viewers through Louisiana Creole culture and its ideas of language, race, and heritage. Meanwhile, craftspeople working on the house confront the racial consequences of the plantation past, as some realize they may be related to the Senegambian slaves who built the home two hundred years ago.
Expected release date: Fall 2006
Producer: Jennifer John/Fresh Media

*Stories From The Faubourg Treme
Video: DVD, color; 60 minutes
Bordering the French Quarter of New Orleans is America’s oldest black urban community. This documentary will blend a wealth of social and cultural history, cultural anthropology, religion, music, poetry, theatre, and folklore, to paint a portrait of this neighborhood that was home to one of the nation’s largest and most influential communities of free people of color in antebellum America.
Producer/Director: Dawn Logsdon

*Funding provided by the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities.

For more info, contact Walker Lasiter • lasiter@leh.org • 504.620.2631