by John P. Meyer

Film explores the bayou ties that bind. Fiercely.

Dallas Video Festival screenings move tonight to the Dallas Theater Center (from the Angelika Dallas venue, where they've been hosted for the previous two evenings).

One of the films on this evening's agenda is Still Waiting: Life After Katrina, a documentary following the lives of displaced residents of St. Bernard Parish who fled the devastation of Hurricane Katrina to establish temporary residency here in Dallas.

Still Waiting, which marks its Dallas premiere with tonight's performance, is the work of producer/researcher (and professor of anthropology at Colorado State University) Katherine Browne, a graduate of SMU (BA in English: 1976; Ph.D in Anthropology: 1993). Browne collaborated with director/cinematographer Ginny Martin from October of 2005 to March of 2007 in order to document the lives of the Tipado family, whose matriarch - a Dallas nurse named Connie - scrambled to find housing for everyone in the extended Tipado family (all 155 of them) in the aftermath of the hurricane. It also chronicles the deep and abiding attachment the Tipados continue to feel for their bayou home, and the ongoing difficulties they encounter as they struggle to re-establish there.

Browne found that little progress was being made to restore the standard of living in the Tipado homeland: "People were optimistic that things could be returned to something comfortable and feeling normal," she says. "Hope was alive…until they got back (to St. Bernard Parish) and started realizing that nothing was happening, and nothing continued to happen."

Grants from the National Science Foundation, Colorado State University and the Women in Film Foundation were drawn upon in order to complete the film project; if you miss tonight's local premiere, you'll have another chance to see it by tuning in to KERA-TV on August 28, which happens to coincide with the eve of the second anniversary of Katrina's gulf coast rampage.

What do you think?