TURKEY CREEK senior editor Bill Anderson (L) and filmmaker Leah Mahan (R) with Sundance Documentary Editing and Story Lab Advisors Lewis Erskine, Carol Dysinger and Jean Tsien.

My life as a mother and a documentary filmmaker sometimes seems like a film that’s out of sync. But there was a wonderful moment this summer when everything clicked.

I had been invited to bring the rough cut of my Turkey Creek documentary to the Sundance Documentary Editing and Story Lab but considered declining the invitation because it meant being away from my two four-year-olds for nine days. Ultimately we came up with a plan for my family to join me for the last couple nights, but I wasn’t sure how it would all work out.

The lab was intense, and the film changed in important ways over the course of the week.

Sundance lab advisors and staff in our editing trailer

Sundance lab gathering on the final day

On the final night of the lab, each of the five filmmaking teams showed a segment of their work that demonstrated what they’d accomplished. Turkey Creek was shown last, and my husband brought our children into the theater just before our screening. My son sat on my lap, and when my editor Bill and I had to leave our seats to respond to questions, I wasn’t sure how he’d react. Clinging to my leg in protest was a very definite possibility. Instead, he sat patiently, listening, and when I returned to sit next to him, he shyly held up his stuffed animal, making it applaud. I was so thrilled to share this moment with him, and so honored by his sweet gesture.

(Cross-posted from Leah’s blog on Bridge the Gulf)

Searching for a way to mark the one-year anniversary of the BP oil disaster, I thought about a series of photographs I saw recently from Lower Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana. They weren’t images of coastal destruction, they were the faces of people young and old holding up a simple handwritten message answering this question: “Why Should We Save Coastal Louisiana?”

The question was asked by Bayou Grace Community Services, which works to address the needs of a largely rural, minority population on Louisiana’s Gulf Coast. This area of the country is more water than land, connected by interwoven bayous and canals.

I decided to contact Rebecca Templeton from Bayou Grace to find out more about the “Why” Photo Project. I first spoke with Rebecca last year, when I interviewed her for Bridge the Gulf several months before the BP disaster. In that February 2010 interview she talked about families like hers that had lived in Lower Terrebonne Parish for generations and were now threatened with displacement because of rapid coastal land loss. I first saw evidence of this problem in 2008, when Louisiana Bayoukeeper and fisherman Mike Roberts took my cameraman on a tour of Bayou Barataria to see the prairies of his childhood that were now ocean. He explained that man-made canals dredged by the oil companies had accelerated land loss. (Visit the Bridge the Gulf Story Map for more testimony about this issue from residents in the southernmost areas of Louisiana.)

Earlier this month I interviewed Rebecca and Diane Huhn, who helped organize the photo project:

Can you give an update on how your community has been impacted by the BP oil disaster?

Rebecca Templeton: It’s important to realize that the BP disaster is just yet another impact of what it means to live in coastal Louisiana. Unfortunately this is another impact of the oil and gas industry. When I think about how the community is doing I think people in the community are tired. People are just weary from these environmental impacts that are taking a toll on our community. Especially when you think of the cumulative effect of all these crises people are enduring here. People really don’t know what this disaster means for our communities. There is still such a great deal of uncertainty about what are the longterm impacts on the environment, fisheries, livelihoods. That level of uncertainty is really worrisome for me. What that does to a community to live under that level of uncertainty time after time.

How did the photo project get its start?

Diane Huhn: The idea came from an experience I had at a retreat with the Institute for Sustainable Communities. We were talking about why we do what we do and what gives us drive and purpose to keep going. The facilitator showed us a website called “Why Do You Do What You Do.” (“A social-media meme of people answering the simple question by combining an image and text in a creative way.”) And it was very, very powerful. I started thinking about why I do what I do. Because I want to save coastal Louisiana. I want to save the culture, the heritage, the environment and everything about this place. So there are two million people that live in coastal Louisiana and that’s two million reasons right there. We decided to kick off the project at an event in Thibodaux called La Fete d’Ecologie. We set up a booth and I’d say over 100 people participated at that event alone.

Rebecca Templeton: I think we saw that this is a project that anyone can participate in and give a meaningful response. We had children who couldn’t write, but they could draw. We had older people who nearly filled up the poster (with words). It surprised me that the responses on the posters ranged from the funny to the touching. And they evoke a very wide range of emotions in the people looking at the photos. That really opened my eyes to see that this has the potential to connect with a really large audience.

Diane Huhn: You don’t have to be a resident of coastal Louisiana to care about saving this place. We work with people from all over the country in our volunteer program. They care very deeply about this place and the people here. So I think it’s really powerful when you have people from Iowa or Minnesota or Maine express their reasons why this place is important and why they feel we should save it. And it’s a great way to bring awareness to folks that don’t know about coastal land loss. We really debated the specific question we wanted to ask. Does the question seem too negative? Should it be “What is your vision for coastal Louisiana?” But we kept coming back to the idea that there are people all over this country that don’t know about land loss and what it means to our communities here. And if we don’t do something we’ll literally be wiped off the map. So we settled on that question of “Why save coastal Louisiana?” so that people that don’t know about coastal land loss would ask the question: “What do you mean save coastal Louisiana? Where’s it going?” Well then you start that conversation about “Well, hey, we have the highest rate of unnatural land loss on the planet.” So it brings that awareness.

What are your plans now for the photo project?

Diane Huhn: Right now we have the whole gallery on our website. Every week we have a “Wednesday Why.” We feature one or more photos that have been submitted to us and we tend to group them around a theme and post them to our website every Wednesday and we post it on our Facebook page and hope people will share those with others. But we definitely have other ideas in mind. When we take the photos at an event we keep the posters because we would definitely like to have a traveling exhibit sometime in the future. And I’d love to go beyond just the posterboard responses and encourage people to create a song or video or dance and express themselves in whatever way makes sense to them.

Anyone can submit a response to the “Why” Photo Project by emailing photoproject@bayougrace.org. Go to the Bayou Grace website to fill out a photo release.

This is the first of several blog posts I plan to write about creative community-based arts and media projects on the Gulf Coast. The next will be about 2-Cent Entertainment and the upcoming Listen! Literacy and Arts Festival.

Left to right: Glynn Washington, Jacquie Jones, Al Letson, Michael Garofalo, Photo by Maria R.M. Howell

“Storytelling is a sacred and beautiful art that we have to continue passing down, whether it be in film, whether it’s on radio, whether it’s on the Internet, whatever multimedia platform that we have to prepare ourselves for, the way that we do it is through telling those stories.” – Al Letson, host of State of the Re-Union

In February I attended the Media That Matters conference at American University, where I spoke about BRIDGE THE GULF on a panel about collaboration. Lately I’ve been immersed in editing and new media work and it was so energizing to be surrounded by creative people experimenting with new forms of communication and storytelling. I was really excited by the final speakers, who are using public radio in new ways and delving into other forms (video, animation, performance) to expand the richness and reach of their stories. I urge you to check out the work of Al Letson (State of the Re-Union) and Glynn Washington (Snap Judgment) and to take a look at the animated documentary series StoryCorps Shorts that airs on P.O.V.

Left to right: Luisa Dantas, Jackie Olive, Pat Aufderheide, Roland Legiardi-Laura, Photo by Maria R.M. Howell

It was great to see that BRIDGE THE GULF was just one of three projects featured at the conference that came out of last year’s Producers Institute for New Media Technologies — Jackie Olive (Always in Season) and Roland Legiardi-Laura (Power Poetry) spoke on a panel titled “Producing Media Across Platforms.” We went through new media “boot camp” together and it was great to hear how these other projects have evolved. For more on what happened at the Media That Matters conference read this report or visit the Media That Matters Facebook page.

Left to right: Amanda Hirsch, Leah Mahan, Dean Hamer, Photo by Maria R.M. Howell

The Daily Show's Wyatt Cenac and Derrick Evans January 2011

I know it won’t be the most shocking media coverage I’ve seen about Turkey Creek. That came in the form of a local newspaper headline in 2003 that read “Mayor: Development foes are ‘dumb bastards’.” Gulfport, Mississippi mayor Ken Combs was unhappy that the African American communities living in the Turkey Creek watershed were, with the help of the Sierra Club and others, getting in the way of a large development project he supported.

I’d made my first visit to Turkey Creek a couple years earlier, when my friend Derrick Evans, whose ancestors settled Turkey Creek after the Civil War, invited me to help document its rich history through the memories of his extended family and neighbors. The city of Gulfport was rapidly growing up around Turkey Creek. The community cemetery, where freed slaves and their descendants were buried, had recently been bulldozed for development.

The citizen-led effort to protect the watershed and the people living there was making headway in 2005 when news broke of a hurricane named Katrina approaching the coast. The area was devastated by the storm, and for a time the national media was interested in efforts to rebuild (”After Hurricane, Eyes on Historic Area“). In the following years, the fragile Turkey Creek watershed and its low-income residents faced an unprecedented onslaught of development.

I was visiting Turkey Creek in April to do some final shooting for the documentary when news broke of the BP oil rig explosion. That same week USA Today had featured Turkey Creek on its front page to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Earth Day (”For them, Earth Day was late in coming“). This was this article that apparently caught the attention of The Daily Show.

While national media attention turns towards the Gulf Coast during particular news cycles, there is struggle and triumph happening every day in communities across the region. Most of the important drama happens under the radar, away from the cameras and headlines. While my documentary-in-progress attempts to capture the story of one historic community fighting for a sustainable future, we wanted a way for communities across the Gulf Coast to also share their stories, even when CNN isn’t paying attention. That’s why we created Bridge the Gulf, a forum where diverse communities across the Gulf Coast tell their stories and share their perspectives in their own voices.

You can help change the story of the Gulf Coast by sharing Bridge the Gulf with your network and joining us on Facebook and Twitter.

To see a video about how the Turkey Creek story was one of the seeds of Bridge the Gulf, click here.

To find out more about the Turkey Creek documentary, which will be completed this year, click here.

NRDC President Frances Beinecke spent time last week on the Gulf Coast with Turkey Creek’s Derrick Evans and other advisors and grantees of the Gulf Coast Fund to learn about how the BP disaster is impacting coastal communities. She wrote about her observations in an article titled “Voice Off the Bayou” on her blog:

“… Still reeling from Katrina and scarred by a federal response so inept that it shocked the world, Evans and those he speaks for are bracing for another punishing round of setback and loss.

“We are a people in constant disaster,” Evans intoned as if quoting Scripture. “We don’t get to recover from one before another hits. It’s almost like a book of Job that doesn’t end.”

Evans is an advisor to the Gulf Coast Fund for Community Renewal and Economic Health, a project of the Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors.

After touring Grand Bayou in an oyster boat last week, he hosted a meeting of other Gulf Coast Fund participants and community activists last in Biloxi, Miss. There, he and his peers spoke clearly and directly about what they need most.

First, he said, they need authoritative information about the risks to health and livelihood. Who is monitoring air and water quality, asks Evans, how are those results being shared and what do they mean to the daily lives and decisions being made by families who live here? …” Read the full article “Voice Off the Bayou”

Derrick Evans leads Gulfport tour for federal and state agencies

Last week I witnessed the sense of dread felt by Gulf Coast communities as the oil spill approached. I was in Gulfport, Miss., shooting footage for my Turkey Creek documentary. Derrick Evans, Rose Johnson and other environmental justice activists working in the Turkey Creek watershed were meeting with officials at the state and federal level on an entirely different subject.

In the last couple months I’ve shot a number of interviews for The Bridge Project with people working to address the impact of the oil industry on coastal communities. Here is a brief clip from Aaron Viles of the Gulf Restoration Network, who spoke about the impact of the thousands of miles of dredging by oil companies in the southern Louisiana wetlands.

Through The Bridge Project, New Orleans Video Voices will be working with the Houma Nation, one of the groups struggling to maintain their connection to the coastal Louisiana ecosystem that has sustained them. Youth leaders will work with media mentors to create a “Watershed Story” video project (additional projects will be underway in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama). Here is a clip from a February interview with Kirk Cheramie about the challenges the Houma Nation faces in securing a sustainable future.

Evans family and neighbors greet relief caravan Sept. 2005

This photo was taken just after sunrise on the morning we’d arrived. Derrick had just greeted his mother, the Rev. Lettie Evans-Caldwell, sitting in the foreground. Miss Lettie and her husband had been rescued from their home during the storm. Water had risen to their necks when neighbors called out to them and swam over to help.

I’ll be returning to Gulfport next week to continue documenting the story. Filmmaker Dawn Logsdon (Faubourg Treme: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans) recently joined our team as Senior Editor and we’re working to finish the Turkey Creek film later this year.