After a recent New York Film Festival screening, Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, the directors of the sheepherding documentary Sweetgrass, claimed that lived experience was more interesting to watch than people talking about their experiences. I couldn’t help but think about this while watching writer-director Hilla Medalia’s After the Storm, a pile of sanctimonious crap that tries to sweeten itself with the perfume of goodwill.
Two years after Hurricane Katrina, a group of New York Broadway actors come to the Lower Ninth Ward to stage, alongside local teenagers at the St. Marks Community Center, a production of Once on This Island that they helpfully describe as “the hurricane musical.” The film follows the show from casting through rehearsals up to performances, with frequent talking-head interruptions to praise the important work that everyone is doing.
Far from covering the process comprehensively, Medalia’s documentary strangely leaves several basic gaps in the story: We don’t know whether any of the kids have done theater before, who’s meant to see the show, how the producers and directors came to town, or how they relate to the community at large. Furthermore, the rehearsal footage is so scattershot that even after the film ended I had no idea what Once on This Island is about.
The kids themselves drop in and out of the movie, their personal conflicts briefly raised and left unresolved, which is a shame, because the few glimpses of their home lives post-Katrina are intriguing; the most vivid involves a home where the family members have to fill a bucket in the kitchen and carry it to the bathroom if they wish to take a hot bath. The filmmakers seem to possess the wrong focus—the real interest here doesn’t lie in the show, but in its actors, whose stories the film either coats with thick piano music or else ignores altogether.
In its place we get the New Yorkers gushing over how amazing the kids are to work with. The show’s producer, James Lecescne, says, “The musical is about the value of getting to tell one’s story, and that’s what we’re here to do.” His words ring ironic because he’s not letting these kids tell their own stories, but imposing a story onto them. And After the Storm does the same.
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