WORK IN PROGRESS SCREENINGS
- IFP Spotlight on Docs Screening
- Work-in-progress screening at Images Cinema
- Work-in-progress screening at Mass MoCA

LINKS
Sinners and Saints Like Me



Unless you’re from Indianapolis or have close connections to that fair city, I’m thinking you just have to be pretty thrilled that the Saints won Super Bowl 44. One of the first people I met when I arrived in New Orleans in November 2005 was an ex-Saints football player named Jim. He spoke to us at his newly-destroyed home, and he spoke movingly and selflessly. Our cinematographer, Sam Henriques was stuck on a TransAir flight in Atlanta, so I just grabbed what I could with my low-end consumer digital camera. The quality is horrific, but you can still get the sense of what these New Orleanians were going through right after Katrina.
 
 
Long story short, I became a Saints fan. Jim’s friend, our most hospitable host Steve Chaplain, had also just been to hell and back, yet he took the time to take us over to the Jim’s Lakeview neighborhood to see the breach at 17th Street.** To an outsider we might have seemed to be making a film about Katrina --  about the destruction, the demise, the broken spirits and rising hope that the disaster had brought to the city. But the hurricane was not what drew me to New Orleans. I was going to meet Steve’s longtime friend and business partner, Gary, the next day. A couple of weeks earlier, Steve had told me that Gary had gotten into some pretty crazy Jesus stuff, as he saw it. End of the world stuff. The Rapture and all that. 
 
Okay, so Sam’s flight finally arrived around noon. We filmed Steve and his brother Danny as they recounted their escape from the city when things became too dangerous in the days following the storm. It wasn’t until the following day that we hooked up with Gary -- right after a huge windowpane came crashing down from our hotel’s neighboring skyscraper and smashed our soundman’s car windshield. At that time, incidents like that were par for the course in Nola, and nobody did much flinching. We just got on with things, and set up for our first interview with Gary. Gary was a kind and open-hearted fellow, a working class guy who had made it pretty fine in life. He had a wonderful wife and two great kids and loved his life in Chalmette. But he had just lost his home of thirty years to the backwash and over-topping of MRGO, to shameful planning and bad engineering, to multi-level corruption, to the disappearing barrier islands and the receding Gulf coastline. He seemed to be hanging on to a thread of hope, and that hope was the promise his faith in Jesus offered him -- a chance to escape the frightening state of the world through the Rapture and rise up to heaven; and he assured us that God would have a mansion waiting for him up there. At a time like that, I was glad that something gave him hope. Did I envy his ability to believe so fervently in something I found impossible to embrace? No, not at all. But I was starting to realize that I was embarking on a very complicated and provocative journey. What I did not know was that it would take me to a more compassionate understanding of fundamentalist faith than I’d ever thought possible for me. Not that I agree with it, mind you. 
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