In this beautiful book, Pulitzer Prize—winning musician and composer Wynton Marsalis draws upon lessons he’s learned from a lifetime in jazz–lessons that can help us all move to higher ground. With wit and candor he demystifies the music that is the birthright of every American and demonstrates how a real understanding of the central idea of jazz–the unique balance between self-expression and sacrifice for the common good exemplified on the bandstand–can enrich every aspect of our lives, from the bedroom to the boardroom, from the schoolroom to City Hall. Along the way, Marsalis helps us understand the life-changing message of the blues, reveals secrets about playing–and listening–and passes on wisdom he has gleaned from working with three generations of great musicians. Illuminating and inspiring, Moving to Higher Ground is a master class on jazz and life, conducted by a brilliant American artist.

Every Year in New Orleans Louisiana the Mardis Gras Indian tribes gather on the Sunday closest to St. Joseph's Day to celebrate their pride and joy. Influenced by his father Les Blank, son Harrod Blank joins the parade with his camera. This is a tribute piece to "Always For Pleasure" by Les Blank.

“Iron Sharpens Iron”, premiering June 8 at The Broad Theater in New Orleans, captures the community of Ironton’s struggles against racism, industrial encroachment, and extreme weather. Located in Plaquemines Parish, Ironton traces its history back to emancipation, with many of the community’s founders having once been enslaved at nearby St. Rosalie Plantation. Their descendants have remained in the area, maintaining a community despite decades of racial segregation and economic injustice.
Directed by filmmaker John Richie and produced by the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, Iron Sharpens Iron chronicles Ironton’s fight against the development of the Plaquemines Liquids Terminal (PLT) atop land that includes their ancestral burial grounds, as well as the destruction wrought by Hurricane Ida.

An exploration into effects of gentrification, COVID -19, and other issues The Culture faces in New Orleans, through the eyes of the youngest Black Masking Mardi Gras Indian Big Chief in the city.

威尔·史密斯饰演真实历史人物：饱受折磨后逃出美国南方奴隶主奴役的黑人彼得、美国奴隶制的著名“证据”照片的主人公。
影片风格被描述为比起《为奴十二年》，更像梅尔·吉布森执导的《启示录》，Willam N. Collage写剧本，故事来自彼得的真实经历：他从奴隶主手中逃出，忍受着冷血的猎人的追杀和路易斯安那州危险的沼泽，一路向北。而当逃到北方军中，接受检查时，彼得露出了自己被种植园中的监工鞭笞得累累伤痕的后背。这一幕被拍成了著名的照片“被鞭打的脊背”(the scourged back)，刊登在1863年5月的《Independent》，以及当年7月4日的《Harper’s Weekly》。该照片成为美国奴隶制残忍暴行的证据之一，发布后推动了废奴运动和促使许多自由的黑人加入联邦军，并流传到世界各地，传言称这张照片使得法国等国家拒绝从美国南方购买棉花。

17 hours, 34 minutes
In the tradition of the best writing on medicine, physician and reporter Sheri Fink reconstructs five days at Memorial Medical Center and draws the reader into the lives of those who struggled mightily to survive and to maintain life amidst chaos.
After Katrina struck and the floodwaters rose, the power failed, and the heat climbed, exhausted caregivers chose to designate certain patients last for rescue. Months later, several health professionals faced criminal allegations that they deliberately injected numerous patients with drugs to hasten their deaths.
, the culmination of six years of reporting, unspools the mystery of what happened in those days, bringing the reader into a hospital fighting for its life and into a conversation about the most terrifying form of health care rationing.
In a voice at once involving and fair, masterful and intimate, Fink exposes the hidden dilemmas of end-of-life care and reveals just how ill-prepared we are in America for the impact of large-scale disasters—and how we can do better. A remarkable book, engrossing from start to finish, Five Days at Memorial radically transforms your understanding of human nature in crisis.

该剧改编自Sheri Fink的同名纪实文学，讲述新奥尔良一家医院里精疲力竭的护理人员在风暴过后被迫做出令人心碎的决定的故事。
在卡特里娜飓风席卷新奥尔良后，当时新奥尔纪念医疗中心遭受洪水泛滥、电力中断、气温急升等问题，而医务人员在这种恶劣环境下被迫作出困扰他们未来多年的选择。医院最终有40名死者，其中有些患者被认为无法活下去，故安排了安乐死。

A contemporary portrait of a small Louisiana town created at the site of the world’s largest lumber mill. Captured here in its last days after thirty years, Miss Dixie Gallaspy conducts a charm school for girls in order to teach the young women of Bogalusa the social graces and skills that would guide them into “Ladyhood”. Dixie’s week long school, in a town confronted with many challenges (including a legacy of racial conflict and financial dissipation) preserves fragments of a world that may already be lost. Director and native son Steve Richardson finds the many charms of this close community, and introduces us to the culture and deep conventions that help define life in an isolated but storied place firmly located in the American South.
Source: Official Site

Bury the Hatchet is a portrait of three Mardi Gras Indian Big Chiefs of New Orleans, descendants of runaway slaves taken in by the Native Americans of the Louisiana bayous. Once plagued by intertribal violence, today these African-American tribes take to the backstreets of New Orleans on Mardi Gras, dressed in elaborate Native American influenced costumes that they sew over the course of the year. When tribes meet instead of attacking each other with hatchets and knives, they battle over which Chief has the prettiest suit.
The film follows Big Chiefs Alfred Doucette, Victor Harris and Monk Boudreaux over the course of five years, both pre and post Hurricane Katrina, and is an exploration of their art and philosophies, as well as their struggles within their communities: harassment by the police, violence amongst themselves, gentrification of their neighborhoods, uninterested youth, old age and natural disaster.
Filmmaker Aaron Walker gained intimate entry into this often hidden New Orleans experience and discovered not only a fascinating and beautiful culture but endearing characters and a truly dramatic narrative. The film is the story of the unique and endangered culture of New Orleans they represent—as bearers of tradition, artists, musicians, and warriors who have laid down their weapons, but not their determination to survive as a people.
With a celebratory soundtrack of New Orleans music and additional scoring by pianist George Winston, the film is an intimate entry into this often hidden New Orleans experience.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, music can save the soul of the city, but can the musicians save themselves?

“If the musicians ain’t got a chance to live, then what chance has the music got?” Dr John.

One Note at a Time is a beautifully crafted, feature documentary, rich with colorful characters. In this mesmerising setting it shows the tragic effects of a failing USA healthcare system. It’s set in the iconic musical backdrop of New Orleans, where the music stopped in 2005…when one of the most deadly and destructive hurricanes in American history struck.

The flood defenses failed, flooding the Crescent City for weeks. Lives were lost and lives were shattered. Many displaced musicians felt compelled to return to the chaos and bleak confusion to play again.

This is the story of some who made it back, told in their own words, with those who fought alongside to resuscitate the music scene; In particular the founders of The New Orleans Musicians’ Clinic and Assistance Foundation, a unique medical facility with the motto… ‘Keeping the music ALIVE’.

The definitive history of Katrina: an epic of citymaking, revealing how engineers and oil executives, politicians and musicians, and neighbors black and white built New Orleans, then watched it sink under the weight of their competing ambitions.
Hurricane Katrina made landfall in New Orleans on August 29, 2005, but the decisions that caused the disaster extend across the twentieth century. After the city weathered a major hurricane in 1915, its Sewerage and Water Board believed that developers could safely build housing away from the high ground near the Mississippi. And so New Orleans grew in lowlands that relied on significant government subsidies to stay dry. When the flawed levee system surrounding the city and its suburbs failed, these were the neighborhoods that were devastated. The homes that flooded belonged to Louisianans black and white, rich and poor. Katrina’s flood washed over the twentieth-century city.
The flood line tells one important story about Katrina, but it is not the only story that matters. Andy Horowitz investigates the response to the flood, when policymakers reapportioned the challenges the water posed, making it easier for white New Orleanians to return home than it was for African Americans. And he explores how the profits and liabilities created by Louisiana’s oil industry have been distributed unevenly among the state’s citizens for a century, prompting both dreams of abundance—and a catastrophic land loss crisis that continues today.
Laying bare the relationship between structural inequality and physical infrastructure—a relationship that has shaped all American cities—Katrina offers a chilling glimpse of the future disasters we are already creating.

The culture of New Orleans represents the mixing of many rich traditions: French, Spanish, African, Irish, Italian. At the heart of this unique culture lie its speechways, the subject of Yeah You Rite!, a close-up video profile of a single language community. New Orleans English has been influenced by the city's rich and varied history, leaving it with dozens of unique words and phrases that all New Orleanians understand but which frequently baffle visitors: words like "lagniappe", "bobo" and "neutral ground" as well as hard-to-translate expressions such as "king cake" or "suck the heads and squeeze the tips" (the proper way to eat crawfish). Yeah You Rite! is a spicy and colorful tribute to this unique dialect.

A few of the points included in Yeah You Rite!

-How New Orleans English has been influenced by the city’s rich and varied ethnic history.

-How the local way of speaking helps bind together disparate cultures of the city.

-How some dialects are considered more socially prestigious than others.

-The remarkable lexicon of local expressions that all New Orleanians understand, such as "lagniappe" (a little something extra), "bobo" (a scratch), and "neutral ground" (the strip in the middle of a boulevard).

-How working class African Americans and whites confront social pressures every time they speak.

If you already use American Tongues in your classes, Yeah You Rite! provides a fascinating case-study example of the linguistic forces in one American city. At the same time, Yeah You Rite! can stand alone as a richly enjoyable introduction to urban linguistics, easily extrapolated to your own community.

Yeah You Rite! was supported by a grant from the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities. First Place Winner, Birmingham Educational Film Festival.