Chicken bones

a short film: now submitting to festivals

life’s a bitch and then you die, so suck the marrow dry.

SYNOPSIS:

With a storm threatening, Rita Katerina, a bitter and elderly Italian, navigates her south Louisiana assisted living home seeking a forbidden cigarette as the winds blow in faces from her past. By highlighting the region's complexities, the film reveals the human urgency of its environmental concerns.

ABOUT:

The character Rita Katerina is based on my grandmother (born in New Orleans to Sicilian immigrants and named in the English derivative Rita Catherine). She was a Creole Italian, a New Orleanian, in union with the city’s soul from her birth in 1919, until the week that two hurricanes displaced her forever to assisted living homes across Cancer Alley and Cajun country - and from where she began a cognitive decline that returned her to the New Orleans of her childhood. The hurricanes that both hit that week and initiated her physical, mental, and emotional transition were also extraordinarily named, Rita and Katrina.

cast and community

My ambition is always to develop story and community in parallel. First Grace United Methodist Church, “The Place Where the City of New Orleans Worships,” my home congregation, provided the “cast” and setting for our production. The same church folks who are in this narrative fiction, are in my documentary, Grace in Deep Water, which tells the story of the church’s formation after Katrina between a predominantly white church and a historical Black church and how it became the birthing ground for so many social justice movements in New Orleans. It is a place that is regarded in esteem by folks like Dr. Cornel West, and an example of what I call “deep community” - a space in which great diversity exists in longevity and resilience, a microcosm of New Orleans.