Upcoming Previews of Bayou La Batre Documentary
Monday, October 17th at 5:00 p.m. - Reception to be followed by 5:30 screening
Tuesday, October 18 at 10:00 a.m. - Screening for High School Students
Both events at Alma Bryant High School in Bayou La Batre, Alabama
The fictional home of the title character in the movie Forest Gump, in reality Bayou La Batre is one of the small communities in south Mobile County that the chamber of commerce calls “The seafood capital of Alabama.”
It is a traditional American community—patriotic, hard working, self-sufficient, and a little insular, but also a place where people without hesitation come to the aid of neighbors in need. It is eccentric and playful in the way that coastal communities can be, and like America, distinctly multi-cultural.
Since the Revolutionary War this fishing village in coastal Mobile County has been a point of entry for waves of immigrants asking for nothing more than their own shot at The American Dream. But when Hurricane Katrina displaced 2000 of the town’s 2300 residents in 2005 only to be followed by the oil spill, they were only the latest in a century long series of often catastrophic threats to its survival.
In the Path of the Storms is a story of persistence in the face of adversity. It is the portrait of a unique and authentic coastal culture struggling to preserve its heritage, sense of identity and vanishing way of life, as seen through the lives of a small, ethnically diverse group of its members each struggling against daunting obstacles of their own.
Among those featured:
- Shrimper Henry Alexander and seafood shop owner Rodney Lyons who talk about the values associated with the traditional seafood culture and the contemporary economic pressures that culture faces.
- Nancy McCall whose ancestors came to find an alternative to life as sharecroppers in Mississippi. Like their French Canadian and Eastern European neighbors, African Americans came to nearby Coden in search of self determination.
- Heang Chhun is a Cambodian refugee whose wife and two children were killed as they fled the Communist Khmer Rouge. He has now built a new life in Bayou La Batre and founded a self help group for his fellow countrymen there.
- Regina Benjamin, the child of a single parent from nearby Daphne, bypassed more lucrative opportunities to focus her medical practice on the underinsured. After Katrina destroyed her clinic she went into debt to rebuild it while buying medication for refuges out of her own pocket.
As the documentary traces its history, these and others personify the character and values of the community and its constituent cultures as it faces natural, social, and economic challenges. In the end it reaches a contemporary crossroads and must define its own identity to have a chance at preserving it.
Friday, October 14, 2011 at 11:50AM Max Shores | 19 Comments | Share Article tagged Bayou La Batre, Documentary, In the Path of the Storms, Mike Letcher, screening 
