The Director

Lisa Katzman works as a journalist, screenwriter, filmmaker, and professor of screenwriting and film. Prior to making“Tootie’s Last Suit,” her first documentary, Ms. Katzman wrote treatments and narration for a number of documentary film projects: including Nicolas Lemann’s “The Promised Land,” and Kartemquin Films’ “Golub.” She also worked as a script and drama consultant on Amos Gitai’s “Eden.”

Ms. Katzman has written on film, culture, food, pornography, and the environment for numerous publications including: The New York Times, Village Voice, Film Comment, Interview, Los Angles Times, Penthouse, Playboy, and Chicago Reader.

Ms. Katzman has taught screenwriting and film courses: at Bard College, the Graduate Film Program of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, and Tulane University. She has also conduced screenwriting workshops for the Woodstock Film Festival.

Ms. Katzman’s screenplay “Rachel and Gerard” is slated to be directed by Charles Burnett. Two other screenplays: “Tamar’s Tale,” about a young woman who comes to work in a most unusual peep show, and “Ruthie’s Hair,” about the friendship of two young women, one of whom develops leukemia, while the other is drawn more deeply into the anti-war movement of the late 60s are in pre-production. Concurrently Ms. Katzman is developing two other documentary projects: one on a dynastic Gypsy Flamenco dancing family in Sevilla, and the other on the environmental degradation caused by Hurricane Katrina, and the oil industry’s exploitation of the catastrophe to increase profits.

Director's Statement

Though the subculture of the Mardi Gras Indians is unique to New Orleans, like jazz — which grows out the same cultural soil of Congo Square— it is also quintessentially American. It is a fantastically imaginative merging of Native American and African traditions that include beading, drumming, and ancestor worship. Beginning in the late 19th century under Jim Crow law, Mardi Gras Indians answered white supremacy and racist exclusion with a spirit of inclusiveness; over time they embraced, for instance, the Sicilian festival of St. Joseph (the patron Saint of the poor), and made it their own.
It is tempting for modern “rootless cosmopolitans” to romanticize ”traditional” cultures, to imagine that the passing of the baton from one generation to the next is a graceful and seamless act of transmission. But of course traditional cultures are as fraught with intergenerational tension as any other social arrangement. Making Tootie’s Last Suit vividly brought home to me that all cultural traditions are larger than the flawed personalities that create them. It caused me to reflect on how one purpose of our distinctly human genius for creating art and culture is to hold our humbling contradictions, and perhaps render them not only bearable, but beautiful. From my perspective, the father-son rivalry, and displays of ego that emerge in the story may seem at odds with, but don’t diminish, the larger values of Mardi Gras Indian culture—which are enduringly spiritual, anti-commercial, and community-based. In spite of his all-too-human shortcomings, it is these values that Tootie Montana represented for over 50 years, and which his heirs, notably his son Chief Darryl Montana, and Chief Victor “FiYiYi” Harris, stand for so crucially today in post-Katrina New Orleans.
Most Americans outside of New Orleans don’t fully realize that the tragedy of Katrina is not over, or that the government’s behavior in its aftermath is stunningly consistent with its shameful negligence during this epic-sized disaster. But gradually the tragedy has grown less visible, and become one of silent, creeping attrition because many of the people who are most affected by it are still dispersed throughout the country, unable to return, or even to join their voices.
While the media continues to spotlight New Orleans’ post-Katrina crime rate and economic stagnation, it is the Mardi Gras Indians, and the broader African-American parading culture (including brass bands, second lines, and jazz funerals) that continue to keep the lifeblood of the city pulsing, by keeping faith with its extraordinary legacy. In the face of a “Road Home” program that moves at a snail’s pace, of the de facto lock-out of all the city’s (mostly elderly and female) public housing residents, and of virtually no public re-building projects (apart from the volunteer- driven Habitat for Humanity), the spiritual power of New Orleans’ black culture feels ever more essential and meaningful to those —no matter what race— who have managed to make it back home. Without question the culture is helping people to heal and renew themselves, and the city, which, if or when it is ever lost—to another hurricane, the alarming rate of wetland erosion, or wrong-headed development and profiteering—will be a death also to a big part of this nation’s soul.

Interviews

Read the Lisa Katzman interview with Offreeler. Read Now

Lisa Katzman with Darryl and Joyce
Montana, Mardi Gras day 2007