Hollow Tree follows the three young women as they come of age in their sinking home-place. Annabelle is white, with Cajun roots, Tanielma Black and Angolan, and Mekenzie is a member of the United Houma Nation. Together, their different perspectives tell a story about the climate crisis in Louisiana, which, as they come to see it, specifically endangers Black and Indigenous lives. We watch as they learn about what has been lost in extracted landscapes and discover how we arrived at our present planetary crisis by considering the stumps, spillways, and towering levee walls of their home landscapes. “We learned a lot from each other just from talking,” said Mekenzie. “We saw how all of our narratives are a piece of the story,” Tanielma agreed.1
At the start of filming, Annabelle, Mekenzie, and Tanielma took the engineering of the Mississippi River for granted. They didn’t realize that the river created Southeast Louisiana, building the state’s coast as it switched course. My favorite account of this is by John McPhee, who describes the river jumping “within an arc about two hundred miles wide, like a pianist playing with one hand.” To Annabelle, Mekenzie, and Tanielma, however, the river was docile, stuck on a course already determined, an image of inevitability about our environment and the way we relate to it, and, in turn, relate to one another. Over the course of filmmaking, they followed their curiosity about the places they live. We read together, studied maps, and I prepared them to interview family and community members. The film brought them into conversation with people of different generations, races, socio-economic backgrounds, and forms of expertise, including scholars, scientists, crawfishermen, engineers, and community activists. Onscreen, the young women, and, in turn, viewers, gain new knowledge but also experience the awkwardness of not knowing, of looking for the right words, and of accepting that we might be wrong.
From this place of discomfort, a new conversation takes form. “For me in school, it was always, you know, you open up a textbook, you take notes, take a test. Boom. I’m done,” said Mekenzie. “I was never gonna use this again. I mean, I’ve learned in school . . . about all of these explorers, like ‘Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492.’ See, it rhymed! Stuff like that stuck.” “Yeah,” Tanielma nodded, “there was a sort of detachment when we’re learning at school. Learning through the documentary was very different because we were engaged. It wasn’t just ‘climate change is happening.’ It’s happening in our backyards, like right next to us, and so it affects us personally. And that’s something that’s missing at school. We just learned these facts, and nobody stopped to talk about how it affected your life and everything about you.”
My filmmaking practice evolved out of my own alternative education. Reading Myles Horton, the founder of Highlander Folk School, John Dewey, Paolo Freire, bell hooks, and Audre Lorde, and watching educational children’s shows like Voyage of the Mimiand 3-2-1 Contact, has inspired me to observe more deeply, to seek teachers in many places, and, as a white director, to engage with the process of having become white. This has meant an ongoing effort, largely through reading, to undo the socialization that denies our country’s histories of Indigenous dispossession and slavery, and the aspiration for control embodied by the river levees. In her book Teaching to Transgress: Education as a Practice of Freedom, author and educator bell hooks writes about teaching her students to be critical thinkers, and about “thinking as an Action.” She believes that it’s only with a radical openness, wherein neither teacher nor student is too attached to or protective of their viewpoints, that critical thinking can occur. Similarly, Freire asserts that education can only be liberatory when everyone claims knowledge as a field in which we all labor. Taking these lessons, in every step of our filmmaking process, we are all learning together—producers Chachi Hauser and Monique Walton, our filmmaking team, collaborators, and me.2
In the film’s research phase, Chachi and I spent time in communities along the Mississippi River—in Dulac, Bourg, Isle de Jean Charles, Henderson—asking people what they noticed changing in their environments. Crawfisherman Roy Blanchard told us how the Atchafalaya River once had “a blue clay bottom,” that the water was so clear that they could drink from it. Chris Brunet told us about the sheer land mass of Isle de Jean Charles when he was a child. “It wasn’t like this,” he said, referring to the pockmarked patchwork of land and water that now characterizes its scenery. Shirrell Parfait-Dardar, Chief of the Grand Caillou/Dulac Band of Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw, told us how the systemic drilling of oil canals caused saltwater to intrude on the coastal wetlands, where many in the tribe live, killing the cypresses, now called “gray ghosts.” “Chief trees,” Parfait-Dardar pointed out, were oak trees planted atop traditional native burial mounds. Because they were elevated several feet by the mounds, they escaped the saltwater; as a result, they were the only living oak trees, and often the only living trees, left in this area. While the remains of the dead protect these oaks for now, at the rate the sea is rising, they will be gone in a decade.
In the car, driving back to New Orleans, Chachi reflected on her newfound understanding of these trees. It made her remember being a child in New York City, thinking “a patch of dirt with a tree growing out of it was simply a spot where concrete wasn’t. I realized,” she continued, “how strange it was for a young person to take for granted the extent of human control over the environment. Since these decisions seem to have already been made for us and have been exercised to such a great magnitude, another way of relating to our environment can seem unimaginable. Understanding how much our country has been built on values of control and exploitation,” Chachi said, “shifted my sense of responsibility.” This is precisely what our filmmaking process is about: learning to expand attention and care.
Prior to production, I spent more than a year visiting the locations where we would later film, often with Chachi. Chachi’s producing role included recording conversations, taking notes, reading, and delving into archives with me at the Historic New Orleans Collection or Louisiana State University’s library. We’d then decide which texts or maps might be useful to share with Annabelle, Mekenzie, and Tanielma. The goal was to guide them in an inquiry process where the documentary form constituted a path to new understandings. We’d submerge ourselves in the physical landscape, too, swimming in the Atchafalaya and wondering if feeling sediment in the water would shape a young person’s understanding of how land was made. How could we accelerate a learning process? And how does this learning become cinematic, so that audiences could also experience it?