A new documentary features the communities of the Atchafalaya Basin, the largest river swamp in the country, as they try to adapt to the changing climate. Watch here.
The filmmakers were drawn to the communities west of Baton Rouge in the Atchafalaya Basin, where the wetlands are uncharacteristically stable but the consequences of climate change can be severe.
In the spring of 2019, the filmmakers Guillaume Fournier, Samuel Matteau, and Yannick Nolin travelled from Quebec to Louisiana to shoot the final installment in a trio of short documentaries. The three films are all centered on Cajun-French culture in Acadiana, a twenty-two-parish region in the southern part of Louisiana. An estimated hundred thousand to three hundred thousand people in the state speak some form of French, a total that has dropped from roughly a million in the nineteen-sixties.
The three directors arrived without a specific focus for the film, but with an alarming and often cited figure about the trajectory of climate change and the consequences of settlement in Louisiana on their minds: the state’s coastal wetlands lost, on average, a football field’s worth of land each hour in recent decades.
“We didn’t just want to show misery,” Matteau told me. “We wanted to find a glimpse of life.” Flickers of entertainment and joy punctuate the film: a sousaphone player performs at the edge of the water, and aerial footage shows an amusement park on the outskirts of New Orleans that was torn apart during Hurricane Katrina, ramshackle but standing.
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