[StBernard] What's St. Bernard Parish got that Dallas doesn't? Ask the Tipados.

[Westley Annis]

SMU alumna's Katrina documentary screens tonight at the Dallas Video
Festival
What's St. Bernard Parish got that Dallas doesn't? Ask the Tipados.

By John P. Meyer

Dallas Video Festival screenings move tonight to the Dallas Theater Center
(from the Angelika Dallas venue, where they've been hosted for the previous
two evenings).

One of the films on this evening's agenda is Still Waiting: Life After
Katrina, a documentary following the lives of displaced residents of St.
Bernard Parish who fled the devastation of Hurricane Katrina to establish
temporary residency here in Dallas.

 
Producer/researcher/professor Katherine Browne (center) with four Tipado
sisters
Still Waiting, which marks its Dallas premiere with tonight's performance,
is the work of producer/researcher (and professor of anthropology at
Colorado State University) Katherine Browne, a graduate of SMU (BA in
English: 1976; Ph.D in Anthropology: 1993). Browne collaborated with
director/cinematographer Ginny Martin from October of 2005 to March of 2007
in order to document the lives of the Tipado family, whose matriarch - a
Dallas nurse named Connie - scrambled to find housing for everyone in the
extended Tipado family (all 155 of them) in the aftermath of the hurricane.
It also chronicles the deep and abiding attachment the Tipados continue to
feel for their bayou home, and the ongoing difficulties they encounter as
they struggle to re-establish there.


Browne found that little progress was being made to restore the standard of
living in the Tipado homeland: "People were optimistic that things could be
returned to something comfortable and feeling normal," she says. "Hope was
alive.until they got back (to St. Bernard Parish) and started realizing that
nothing was happening, and nothing continued to happen."

Grants from the National Science Foundation, Colorado State University and
the Women in Film Foundation were drawn upon in order to complete the film
project; if you miss tonight's local premiere, you'll have another chance to
see it by tuning in to KERA-TV on August 28, which happens to coincide with
the eve of the second anniversary of Katrina's gulf coast rampage.