Crime On The Bayou, Nancy Buirski, 2021, 89min, USA.
A Crime On The Bayou will stream in our Virtual Cinema for $12 from July 9-22.
It's 1966 in Plaquemines Parish, a swampy strip of land south of New Orleans. A young Black fisherman, Gary Duncan, tries to break up a fight between white and Black teenagers outside a newly integrated school. He gently lays his hand on a white boy’s arm and the boy recoils like a snake. That night, police arrested 19-year-old Gary Duncan for assault on a minor.
After months of clashes, the public schools have been integrated by court order. But we are in the land of the white separatist despot, Leander Perez, who rules Plaquemines like his fiefdom, making sure that segregation sticks regardless of federal laws desegregating schools and mandating voting rights. Arresting men like Duncan keeps Black people in their place. With the help of a young attorney, Richard Sobol, Duncan bravely stands up to Perez. Systemic racism and pervasive anti-Semitism meet their match in decisive courtroom battles, including the U.S. Supreme Court; hate is vanquished by a powerful friendship that will last a lifetime. With the rise of white nationalism in the U.S. and abroad, there is no more important story to tell today. The roots and the mechanics of hate groups are in full display in this dramatic story of a crime on the bayou.
Our nation is beginning to confront our past in order to understand our present, engaging in the slow process of ‘tearing’ down historical commemorations of oppressors; our film is a part of the replacement, the more truthful re-telling of our past. In it we see monuments dismantled, from the “pretend laws” of Jim Crow to anthemic music symbolically transformed. We see children water hosed then voting for the first time. We see Gary Duncan getting justice in the U.S. Supreme Court.
But as we witness protests in today’s streets, we are reminded there is much that remains to be done, even if our story suggests there is hope in Gary’s story and in the allyship it represents. For every Gary Duncan there are thousands of Black men incarcerated for touching a white boy’s arm.
