Watermarks: A Film About Katrina Survivors

A team of students and faculty from University of New Orleans collaborates every year on a film shot during spring break. Previously, these projects were the domain of faculty, but graduate and undergraduate film students have joined the faculty in the last two years. Before, the spring film was a competition among filmmakers, each vying for their work to be selected. In the wake of Katrina, university filmmakers began to work together to select their next project among the scripts written and 2006's project Watermarks, a short narrative film that tells stories of Katrina survivors, is the result.

The film is comprised of three separate stories that are united thematically by what producer and UNO teacher Michelle Benoit calls "visual wraparounds." These wraparounds were written, produced and directed by university film students Simon Carmody and Christopher Waltman. The three narratives were the result of a combination of faculty and students.

In the first story, Floating, two neighbors, Melvin and Shelia, are stranded on the roof of their apartment building while the body of a third neighbor floats in the water below. Melvin is a middle-aged white man while Shelia is a young black woman and the two have little in common except their abandonment in the wake of the storm. They wait together for help and we're left to wonder whether they were saved or left indefinitely on the roof.

Crescent City Connection(CCC), tells the story of Sam and his wife Antoinette, evacuees living in a Houston hotel room. Sam returns to his home in New Orleans and his brother King, whom he had to leave behind. King gives Sam a tour of the devastation of their home and admits that he became a looter in order to survive, challenging Sam to judge him for it. Sam returns to Antoinette in Houston, determined to bring her back to New Orleans and begin making their lives "normal" again. Antoinette decides to stay in Houston and again the film stops short of telling us what Sam decides.

The final story, Nola, gives us Kate, a woman living alone in a tent on the lawn of her property. We experience with her the noises in the night that make her feel vulnerable and her isolation as she rides her bike around her abandoned, lifeless neighborhood. She finds community in the strangest of places-sharing frustration with the people she meets at the FEMA office.

Watermarks was filmed on location in the 9th Ward, Chalmette and Gentilly during April of 2006. Members of the production teams were homeless or living in FEMA trailers without electricity. The narratives in the film are nothing if not personal and honest in their depiction of the emotional turmoil involved in every step of the recovery process.