A Conservative Black mayor is challenged by a White Liberal and the stakes could not be higher. Race in New Orleans its complicated.

Director/Producer Katherine Cecils documentary RACE is a film about the first election held in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. Against the backdrop of a largely displaced citizenry, a devastated landscape, and an increasingly divided community, the film examines the unusual circumstance around incumbent Mayor Ray Nagin's unlikely re-election in 2006 from a completely different electorate than had first put him in office. More broadly, the film is a cautionary tale about the deterioration of trust between groups post-disaster, with universal and timeless lessons for students of politics, history, race relations, and disaster management. 

• Screening at film festivals in 2010 and 2011
• Trying to recover debt, ANY donations welcome! (tax deductible)

Funded by New Orleans white conservatives, Nagin first ran as the business candidate. Largely unpopular within most of the African-American community, Nagin had first been elected to office in 2002 receiving 86% of the white vote and 38% of African-American professional votes, and prior to Hurricane Katrina, he had been expected to win re-election with relative ease.

But following the destruction wrought by the failure of the federal levees, it became apparent that New Orleans might have lost its African-American majority for the foreseeable future, Nagin lost his white base, and an unprecedented number of candidates emerged to challenge him, most of whom were white. With the displacement of so many people, Nagin faced the fight of his political life.

On May 22, 2006, Nagin won re-election with 83% of the African-American vote, and 21% of the white vote, a near reversal. This very local election garnered the interest of the national media, and RACE examines how the final result came to effectively constitute a post-Katrina Civil Rights protest of sorts, but one in which many participants had mixed feelings, and the documentary tells the story of a pivotal political moment of enormous importance to a city in crisis.

This CecilFilm Productions documentary is being made in association with the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, with generous funding from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and The Fertel Foundation.

Fiscal Sponsor: Video Veracity, a 501(3) non-profit organization established in 1993 which supports the production and distribution of film and video work by independent media producers in New Orleans and the surrounding region.

Video Veracity
CecilFilm Productions
Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities

RACE focuses entirely on the smoldering undercurrents of race and class distrust typically papered over in a gauzy haze of nostalgia. Felipe Smith, Ph.D., African and African Diaspora Studies, Tulane University