I'm Carolyn Parker: The Good, the Mad, and the Beautiful

A couple of months after Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans in 2005, Jonathan Demme met the pugnacious Carolyn Parker in front of her damaged home in the Lower Ninth Ward. He ended up following her over the course of five years, as she worked to reconstruct her house and the local church, and to get the community back together. Carolyn Parker is a retired hotel cook who dedicates herself with humor and inexhaustible energy to the rebuilding of her neighborhood. She was one of the first residents to return home after the hurricane. During a meeting about the recovery plan, she gave an angry and powerful speech. In response to the suggestion that residents get bought out and the neighborhood be demolished, she exploded. "I don't think it's right that you try to take my property. Over my dead body. I didn't die with Katrina." Before the storm, most people had never even heard of the Lower Ninth Ward. TV stations eager for sensation came for the disaster, but then they left and never returned. Demme takes a different approach, a far more personal one, by carrying on calm conversation with Carolyn from behind his camera, and by filming without any hurry whatsoever.