Located on the far side of the edge of the French Quarter in New Orleans, Faubourg Treme may be the oldest African-American neighborhood in the country. In the years leading up the Civil War, free people of color, drawn to New Orleans by the city's relatively laid-back attitude towards slavery and those trying to escape from it, turned the area into a haven for black poets, artists, and political activists. But long before Katrina washed through the neighborhood, driving off long-time residents and destroying the homes they left behind, Faubourg Treme had slipped into a mire of poverty, crime, and neglect. Among locals, the area was becoming best identified as one of the centers of the city's crack epidemic when, in the late 1990s, New Orleans Times-Picayune columnist Lolis Eric Elie decided to buy a house in the neighborhood. Elie is onscreen for much of this documentary, which credits him as writer and "co-director" and Dawn Logsdon, who worked as an editor on such superior recent documentaries as Paragraph 175 and The Weather Underground, is credited as "director." They began work on it around the time that Elie acquired his house, five years before Katrina hit.
Happily, the storm left their footage unharmed, which is more than can be said for Elie's home. One of the major figures in the movie is Irving Trevigne, a carpenter who specialized in lovingly restoring the old houses of New Orleans, a man who seems to embody the spirit and history of the city that he would be driven from by the hurricane. He's shown talking about his feeling for what he does while hard at work fixing up the house that will be trashed in the storm. The film that Elie and Logsdon have made is partly a history of Treme and partly a tribute to its enduring charm and the people who lived there, and on both those levels, it's a fine piece of work. But it's most memorable as a requiem, one made all the more affecting because the filmmakers shot most of it without having any way of knowing that they were recording a community that was on the verge of being hammered out of existence.
