Alex LeMay’s documentary “Desert Bayou” tells a Hurricane Katrina story that you almost certainly haven’t heard. The film opens on a sunny, picturesque day in Salt Lake City when a JetBlue airliner cruises in for a landing. A rainbow paints the mountaintops surrounding the airport. As the jet pulls up to the gate and the doors open, the passengers exit carrying their luggage. This isn’t an ordinary day, and these aren’t ordinary passengers, however.
The plane is from New Orleans, and its passengers are 600 African American evacuees who were unable to leave the city before the storm struck. The bags they carry contain all the possessions they were able to save from their homes. The evacuees boarded the airplane without being told where they were going, only finding out their destination in midair. What follows is a Hollywood high concept: 600 black evacuees in Utah—welcomed by some and feared by others—confronting their own ideas about being alone in a desert environment populated almost exclusively by white people.
Holy shit. From a rooftop in The Big Easy to Salt Lake City? Not that there's anything wrong with SLC (cough), but...
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