Stories from the Lower 9th Ward
May 31st, 2007 by Larry SmithIf you like what we’ve done with real stories from New Orleans on our webcomic, A.D., you’ll love what’s possible when you’ve got a Oscar-winning director and a crew and a budget that yields hundreds of hours of footage of stories of real people, all of which led to the PBS series Right to Return: New Home Movies from the Lower 9th Ward. Since last January, Jonathan Demme has been filming the lives of dozens of people from the Lower 9th, and now unfurls their stories on rebuilding and restarting their lives in 15-minute segments the rest of this week on the Tavis Smiley show. “They told me I should go to Houston,” Cherice Harrison-Nelson explains in one of the segments. “New Orleans is my home. Why shouldn’t I come back here?” If you’ve missed the first few parts, the series will no doubt be rerun, and excerpts can be viewed the PBS site now.