KATRINA BABIES
by Kathryn Loggins

Edward Buckles Jr., USA 2022

In 2005 Hurricane Katrina devastated the city of New Orleans and its surrounding areas, and claimed the lives of over 1,800 people, while displacing thousands upon thousands more. The survivors endured the most horrific conditions in makeshift shelters with the government struggling to provide enough aid. Edward Buckles Jr., director of the documentary KATRINA BABIES and a New Orleans native, was twelve years old when Katrina destroyed his childhood home. They survived because he and his family left the city just in time. Buckles Jr. eventually returned to New Orleans and became a high school media instructor. Through his interactions with his students, he realized that most of them were suffering from a deep-rooted trauma nobody was willing to address. He recognized the same trauma in himself but couldn’t put it into words when he was younger. Buckles Jr. perceived that they shared the collective experience of surviving the storm as children, but they also had something else in common: nobody had ever asked them if they were okay.

KATRINA BABIES is the first-time filmmaker’s effort to reckon with the grief, pain, and suffering these survivors had to suppress for nearly two decades. As he gives his subjects a safe platform to finally recount their stories, many display heartbreaking emotion, not because of the horrors of reliving their experiences, but because they feel deep gratitude for simply being asked about it. Buckles Jr. engages in his own catharsis, artfully retelling his family's ordeal during Katrina through animated reenactments and home interviews. The film is a remarkably affecting and expertly crafted first feature, which won Edward Buckles Jr. the Best New Documentary Director Award at the Tribeca Festival. (KL)