November 24, 2002

Film on La.'s chemical corridor saddens, inspires documentarian
By John Wirt
Advocate entertainment writer


Inspired by a story she read in The Wall Street Journal, Laura Dunn created a Louisiana-set, Academy Award-winning documentary. Dunn was a 23-year-old grad student at the University of Texas when she began documenting the people and petrochemical plants residing in the industrial corridor that runs from Baton Rouge to New Orleans.

"I was interested in a story that combined racial issues in the South, politics and environmental problems," Dunn said from Austin, where she runs Two Birds Film, the company she founded to distribute Green.

Dunn got started by contacting the Tulane Environmental Law Clinic, which represented mostly poor, black St. James Parish residents who opposed Shintech Inc.'s plans to build a $700 million polyvinyl-chloride plant in their already plant-filled community. Dunn followed up her Law Clinic contact by attending a meeting of the National Environmental Justice Advisory Committee in Baton Rouge. She made many contacts there and subsequently spent two years assembling Green.

Obviously, venturing into refinery- and chemical plant-saturated south Louisiana to make a film that is critical of the oil and chemical industries is swimming against a mighty tide.

"I got really depressed making Green," Dunn admitted. "I hit rock bottom. But once I confronted that place and found so much inspiration in the people who are living and struggling in Louisiana every day, I felt a lot stronger.

"A lot of these folks are living in nightmares. Their husbands might work for a chemical company and it might be their only income. The political pressure within these small communities to not speak out is astronomical. And then their kids have nosebleeds and yet they get up everyday and fight this big fight. It was a heartbreaking story in some ways, but in other ways the spirit of these people to rise against all odds stayed with me.

"The other thing is I feel a lot better when I engage problems rather than just accept or resign myself to them. I don't expect to change the world, but at least I have a healthier conscious when I look the truth in the eye."

Green has been shown at colleges, film festivals and for the National Cancer Policy Board at the National Academy of Sciences, Institute of Medicine. In March 2001, Dunn, a New Orleans native, brought Green back to Louisiana, showing it in 10 communities featured in the film.

Green has gotten mostly positive reactions, Dunn said. The film includes interviews with Attorney General Richard Ieyoub, Convent residents Emelda West and Pat Melancon, former Department of Environmental Quality Director Dale Givens and Sam Thomas, a former Gonzales resident who compiled a registry of childhood cancer near chemical plants.

"I look out in the audience afterwards and a lot of people are crying, choked up," Dunn said. "I've gotten an emotional response from diverse audiences across the country. I have not gotten any response from industry. I know that industry people have seen it, but I don't think it's in their interest to respond."

The film's awards include the 2001 Student Academy Award for best documentary.

"They flew me out there," Dunn said, "and put me up in their fancy hotel in Beverly Hills for five days. I had dinner with the Academy governors and they televised the ceremony from the Academy auditorium. It's really neat, especially because the whole reason I made this film was to draw light to some of the struggles going on in communities in south Louisiana."

Dunn's next project was even bigger than Green. Become the Sky covers oil, energy and politics in Texas.

"We traveled 4,000 miles across Texas," she said. "It's really different from Green. There aren't that many people in this film, whereas Green was all about the people."

Dunn was preparing to edit Become the Sky on Sept. 11, 2001.

"Here I am making a film about oil and politics in Texas," she said, "and it was like, 'How can I do this now?' So the film became poetic and personal, as opposed to polemic. It kind of had to."

In the years since she began her documentary career, oil man George Bush has been elected president, the nation was shocked by the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 and both houses of Congress have come under conservative rule. The ecologically minded Dunn was already swimming against political currents in 1999, but now those currents have swelled.

"Definitely has," she said. "But I'm not deterred at all."

Oddly enough, a seemingly obvious audience for Green, public television, hasn't been particularly interested in being Green, Dunn said.

"The politics of PBS are complicated and as much as the executives there deny politics play into their decisions, I know it does. The awards are really helpful, though. They make the film harder to reject."