POINTE NOIRE
7 p.m. February 8
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.
The screening will be held in Theater 1, RFC’s 124-seat capacity theater, followed by a Q&A with filmmaker Pat Mire, co-writer Rebecca Hudsmith (an LSUS graduate and Shreveport native), and executive producers Scotte and Nikki Hudsmith (also Shreveport natives!).
About the Filmmaker
Pat Mire
Pat Mire is a prize-winning documentary and narrative fiction filmmaker based in Lafayette, Louisiana. Mire’s documentaries on Cajun culture have been aired nationally in the United States on PBS, the Discovery Channel, and other television and on-line networks around the world and have won numerous awards in national and international competitions.
Mire’s narrative feature film debut, “Dirty Rice,” was an official selection at the 1998 London Film Festival, where it played to two sold-out auditoriums. 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 of the longest running film to play in a Lafayette, Louisiana movie theater where it was held over for five straight months in 1998.
Mire directed “Against the Tide: The Story of the Cajun People,” which was a November 2000 PBS “Pick of the Week” and won the national “Best Historical Documentary” by PBS. Clay Fourrier, executive producer of Louisiana Public Broadcasting, has 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.”
Pat Mire is founder and artistic director of Cinema on the Bayou Film Festival in Lafayette Louisiana. Founded in 2006, COTB was born when
Hurricane Katrina resulted in the cancelation of the New Orleans Film Festival that year. COTB is ranked in the top 15 winter film festivals in the
U.S., and with over a thousand film submissions worldwide, it regularly screens nearly 200 world, U.S. and Louisiana premieres from around the
world each January.
Pat Mire grew up in a farming community near Eunice, Louisiana. He is an English and French-speaking Cajun, busy at correcting stereotypes and misconceptions about his beloved Cajun culture by presenting an insider’s perspective.