Local filmmakers capture the people helping to rebuild New Orleans

Three years after Hurricane Katrina nearly drowned New Orleans, documentaries about the event continue to crop up.

While Spike Lee's four-hour HBO film, "When the Levees Broke," took a sweeping epic approach, more recent efforts, including "Trouble the Water" and "The Church on Dauphine Street," have been more personal.

Indeed, the husband-and-wife team of Rustin Thompson and Ann Hedreen, who co-directed the latter for their Seattle-based company, White Noise Productions, felt both inspired by Lee's film and liberated by it — to follow their own muse.

"We made a conscious decision: no flood footage, no Mardi Gras, no Dixieland jazz," said Thompson. "It had to all take place in the present."

At the same time, he said, "we were going for a patient tone and mood, something to reflect that great New Orleans vibe: a mosaic of life in New Orleans post-Katrina."

The filmmakers focused on the attempts of Seattle volunteers who went to Louisiana to help rebuild the devastated city, concentrating on the attempts by Mercer Island organizer Jack vanHartesvelt to put a ruined Catholic church back together again.

The original 83-minute version of the film is showing at the Grand Illusion Theatre; it's also available on DVD, with a couple of DVD extras. A 60-minute edition, which has less to do with the Catholic Church's history in New Orleans, shows at 9 tonight and 7 p.m. Friday on KCTS-TV.

"When we first went to New Orleans," said Hedreen, "my visceral reaction was that this was a Third World country." After six trips to the city, they assembled their footage and found a story line.

The film is narrated by Hedreen, who wrote and produced it; it was photographed and edited by Thompson. Since their days working together at KIRO-TV (where they met in the late 1980s), that's how they've divided up their chores.

"I can get lost in images," said Thompson, adding that his wife sometimes has to pull him back to the narrative. Some of the photography was done by their 16-year-old son, Nick, a junior at Garfield High, who also worked on the music.

Although the market for documentaries has dropped since the release of the last Michael Moore movie, DVD sales of "The Church on Dauphine Street" are picking up. The filmmakers get enthusiastic e-mails when it's shown on New Orleans television.

"We had some trepidation about that," said Hedreen, who worried that New Orleans natives would react poorly to a Seattle-made film. "It's meaningful to us that they felt that it tells their story."

Hedreen and Thompson's earlier nonfiction films include "A Story of Three Churches" (which also deals with church restoration), "Quick Brown Fox: an Alzheimer's Story" and "30 Frames a Second: The WTO in Seattle."

Thompson said "about four seconds" of his footage from "30 Frames a Second" was used in the fictionalized "Battle in Seattle" movie that opened the Seattle International Film Festival in May.

"I thought that movie did a good job of telling all the different sides of the story," said Thompson. "There were elements that glossed over the truth, but it was a worthy depiction."

Since finishing "The Church on Dauphine Street," Hedreen and Thompson have gone back to doing films for nonprofit organizations for their White Noise Productions. Hedreen is also working on a memoir about her late mother, who was the subject of "Quick Brown Fox: an Alzheimer's Story."

John Hartl:

johnhartl@yahoo.com