A rural Cajun community reckons with a 30-year-old double murder. Is this folk justice or a travesty of justice?
Filmmaker and crawfisherman Louis Leger (Roy Dupuis) and criminal defense attorney Dolores Arceneaux (Myriam Cyr) join forces in the Cajun prairie community of Pointe Noire in an effort to save the life of Joel Richard (Michael Bienvenu), a falsely accused man on Louisiana's Death Row. What follows is a search to find out what really happened 30 years ago when two people were killed on the night of the traditional courir de Mardi Gras. Along the way, Louis and Dolores uncover a hauntingly beautiful, isolated community suffering from genetic bottlenecking, secrecy and deceit, yet striving to achieve its own form of folk justice. Drama, 1 hr 47 mins., NR.
Directed by: Pat Mire
Starring: Louis Leger, Dolores Arceneaux, Joel Richard, Fanny Arceneaux
Pat Mire is an internationally recognized Louisiana filmmaker. Mire’s documentaries on Cajun culture have aired nationally on PBS and other on-line platforms around the world and have won numerous awards in national and international competitions.
Mire’s narrative feature film debut, “Dirty Rice,” premiered at the 1997 New Orleans Film Festival and was an official selection at the 1998 London Film Festival. Neil Norman, film critic for the London Evening Standard, reviewed the film and wrote, “[w]hile the Big Easy, No Mercy, and more recently, Eve’s Bayou have flirted with the Cajun world, this is the real deal, 100% proof. This is not to be missed.” Theatrically released on United Artists screens, “Dirty Rice” still has the record for the longest running film to play in a Lafayette, Louisiana movie theater, where it was held over for five straight months.
Mire directed “Against the Tide: The Story of the Cajun People of Louisiana,” which was a November 2000 PBS “Pick of the Week” and was awarded the national “Best Historical Documentary” by PBS.
Clay Fourrier, long-time executive producer of Louisiana Public Broadcasting, recognized that Mire’s work has led to a number of high-profile film projects with LPB that have been aired nationally on PBS and that have garnered “both LPB and Mr. Mire numerous awards, including nationally recognized Telly and NETA awards of excellence.” According to Mr. Fourrier, all of these films highlight “the good things about South Louisiana and the Cajun culture.” Fourrier adds that “in his films, Pat shows the contributions of real people, not Hollywood stereotypes, to our country. This is the underlying theme of all of his work.”
Mire is founder and artistic director of Cinema on the Bayou Film Festival, an international juried film festival in Lafayette, Louisiana. Founded in 2006, Cinema on the Bayou was born when Hurricane Katrina resulted in the cancellation of the New Orleans Film Festival in the fall of 2005. In the 20 years since, each January, Cinema on the Bayou regularly screens over 150 world, U.S. and Louisiana premieres from around the world, including a large number of French language films.
He grew up in a farming community near Eunice, Louisiana on the Cajun prairie. He is an English and French-speaking Cajun committed to correcting stereotypes and misconceptions about his beloved Cajun culture by presenting an insider’s perspective.
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