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Directed/Produced by Diana BoylstonDirected/Edited by Stephen Tyler |
Teacher Diana Boylston evacuated to Houston during Hurricane Katrina not knowing if she'd ever see her students from the 9th Ward again.
A 9th Ward native, Diana Boylston was working in public schools in her old neighborhood when Hurricane Katrina struck.
Evacuated to Houston, she wrote a plea for information about her students to The Times-Picayune, and the note was posted at NOLA.com.
Not long afterward, her phone made a funny sound.
It was Boylston's first-ever text message, a familiar first for many New Orleanians during those early post-K cell-blackout days.
It was from one of her students. Many more came later.
Boylston started capturing video of her efforts to assist displaced former students in December 2005. "Unnatural Disaster: Falling through the Cracks", a half-hour documentary airing tonight at 10:30 on WYES-Channel 12, is about three of them.
It's also about Boylston. A lot. But that's OK. The democratization of local Katrina-aftermath reportage and commentary -- the bloggers who are covering the neighborhood-by-neighborhood struggle to recover -- has been a compelling side-story to the recovery itself.
"Unnatural Disaster" is a personal story by necessity. A frustrating experience with mainstream media -- a network news program interviewed some of the lost students Boylston found, but never aired the footage -- prompted her to take a camera into her own hands.
"My intention was that if I can get the story out there, someone on the news, on television, could help my students," she said. "I was just a teacher."
And not, she admits, a filmmaker. Far from it.
"I never picked up a camera myself until this film," she said. " I financed this documentary with the sole intention of saying, 'This is their reality.' We can talk about the levees, and we could talk about FEMA. We could talk about the politics and all these other things, but this comes down to the triumph of the human spirit, and redemption. This is their lives and their story."
In the film, those lives belong to twin brothers Dwan and Dwight Valdery (who ended up in rural Missouri) and Johari Antoine (who ended up in Atlanta by way of a year at Choate Rosemary Hall prep school in Connecticut), all three of whom Boylston met at Carver Middle School when she was involved with an arts-based learning-enrichment program there.
Unemployed as a teacher since Katrina, Boylston paid for most of the taping and travel herself (and with the blessing and support of her firefighter husband, Wesley Clark). Editor Stephen Tyler helped her shape the sprawling reportage into a half-hour form.
There's plenty more where these approximately 25 minutes come from. Boylston estimates that she's helped more than 30 students find local birth certificates since the storm so they could enroll in distant schools. She's got footage from nearly 90 interviews.
"Actually, I had no idea where it was going to end," Boylston said. "It was just a living journal. When it started all I wanted to do was have proof of what was happening, and as the story kept going I kept going into my savings, paying money for (camera operators, of which there were several) to follow me around to different parts of the country."
"My husband just kept saying to me, 'You cannot stop until this story gets out there. You can't control life. You can't control anything. But your mission is to tell this story for them, until they can tell their own story.'"
TV columnist Dave Walker can be reached at dwalker@timespicayune.com or 504.826.3429.
Three teens are missing.
Where are they? Are they alive or did they suffer a horrible fate during one of the worst natural disasters in history? It became their teacher's journey to find them. Diana Boylston's "Unnatural Disaster: Falling Through The Cracks" is a propelling and heart-warming documentary about the struggle of a group of inner-city students and their teacher after Hurricane Katrina.
By lending her voice, she puts a face of the hurricane's young victims. A documentary unlike any other ever produced, this dynamic piece will astound you as Diana follows students Johari, Dwan, and Dwight for four years after Hurricane Katrina. A journey filled with twists and turns, the audience will experience the opportunities, pitfalls, forced relocations and the inevitable return "home".
Filmmakers Diana Boylston and Stephen Tyler spotlight what is good in all of us and the difficulties of a generation shortchanged by the people and systems they relied on to prepare them for their future. This is NOT a story about Hurricane Katrina or New Orleans. It is about the people who lived through both.
A thirty-minute film that is a work-in-progress, "Unnatural Disaster: Falling Through The Cracks" was accepted in the Cannes Film Festival's "Short Film Corner" in 2007 and 2009, as well as the New Orleans Film and Video Festival in 2006.
"Unnatural Disaster: Falling Through The Cracks" was directed and produced by Diana Boylston. She's a performing arts teacher turned documentary filmmaker.
An interview with Diana is like no other! Diana is available for interviews and public speaking engagements. You may contact her at 504-914-5302 or e-mail Diana at boylstonclark@cox.net. Let's speak up for our children and give them a voice.
Check Diana's Blog Page for regular updates on individuals.
Listen to Spirit of New Orleans performed by Diana Boylston. The complete song will soon be available.
After Katrina, my sole intention was to respond to my students' calls from around the country and help them connect. Connect to family members, schools, or any kind of help I could offer.
As an evacuee myself, I volunteered at the Astrodome in Texas, giving out my cell number to any young person who would accept it. My goal became to enroll people. Enroll them in schools, programs, and even enroll good-hearted strangers looking for someone affected by the storm, to help.
After three years, my goal is clear. I'm here to speak for the young people you can't reach, put a face on the hurricane's youngest victims, and help them speak for themselves. One of the best ways I've found to do this is to record their struggles and successes in Unnatural Disaster: Falling Through The Cracks. I didn't intend to shoot a documentary and I didn't intend to follow the kids for three years. But until I can get out their stories, representing thousands of other young people's stories, my mission isn't complete. Please consider becoming a part of this solution.
One of my displaced students needs legal help and believes he's being discriminated against because he's gay. Another can't seem to get her course work credit so she can get her graduation certificate. Another can't read, can't read the GED instructions so he can't pass, therefore he can't get a job in his new hometown. I need help getting this film into the hands of people who can help us.
They are lost.
USA Today said after the Gulf Coast region was flattened, about 372,000 students were displaced to 49 states. Three years later, there are still no firm statistics proving how many teens didn't even enroll in a new school after they evacuated, or if they did, how many of those same teens, dropped out. As a resident of New Orleans and an advocate for children, I can tell you that there's no way to know how many teens who have returned home, but never returned to any school.
No matter what a child's race, creed or color, it's imperative that children have the resources necessary to become adults who can contribute to society at large. America is letting its children and future fall through the cracks. Families disintegrate and children's futures are reduced to hopelessness in the richest nation on earth. Yet just as true is the fact that the human spirit continues to have the capacity to override any societal disaster, natural or otherwise. One person - determined to make a difference in the lives of others - will. One person, reaching outside his/her own pain, can affect and even improve the quality of another's life.
America divides itself into a nation of "the haves" and "the have-nots." This mission is to seek solutions to the kind of catastrophic problems many of us will face at some point. What begins with a focus on problems specific to people of the Gulf Coast, results in showing us that with all our diversity, we are more alike than different when it comes to our universal needs in order to heal and thrive. Articles in Journal of Clinical Child & Adolescent Psychology "show that the impact of the disaster was felt at societal, community, family and individual levels".
A child's mental health as well as his ability to adjust, learn, and prepare to become productive member of society, "is affected by the mental health of adults caring for them." With the passage of time, political inertia, burnout, and corruption, New Orleans may have slipped off the ratings radar. Another goal is to raise this question. "If a disaster can happen to us and no one rescues our children, who will save your child if it happens in your town?"
Everyone deserves to be heard.
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