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I was a juror for the New Orleans Film Festival narrative shorts division this year. I was feeling so puffed up - in an indie-nerdy kind of way, like Cinemania without the peanutbutter sandwiches, while I watched eighty or so, five to thirty minute films - that I invited some people I know only virtually, by way of a photo collectors mailing list, to submit their film to NOFF. It's called Other People's Pictures and it made the cut in the documentary division. Each jury is very tight-lipped about selections and prizes, so I honestly wasn�t sure how this film, on a subject so close to my heart, was doing. But I am so pleased with myself for getting film and festival together. They have a recently updated website and they received NPR coverage just after their first screening at SilverDocs.

The filmmakers are coming down for their first visit to an again unscathed Crescent City...to bask in the limelight, but hopefully not to meet with any 130 mile an hour winds or a rising Mississippi River. This seeming unending and relentless hurricane season is turning us all into loons, or herons, more like. I still haven't put all my photographs back up on the walls and shelves and dressers, but the wrought iron furniture is no longer bungee corded down to the deck and the kitty has resumed his normal fat, lazy cat behaviors.

The only film jury meeting I missed this summer was to spend a long weekend at Gulf Shores with a childhood friend in her family�s beach house. Today, she goes to see what�s left in the sand and wreckage. I�m sad for the families with generations of memories spent on the beach where Ivan made landfall, and guilty with relief that the French Quarter and the hundred-plus-year-old oaks, that line avenues and shade nearly-as-old New Orleans homes, were spared once more. And then, I think of the casinos that weren�t here just a few years back and wonder: what are the odds? According to what the experts say about flood levels, we would have had to swim out to the theater on Canal Street (on the third floor, mind) where much of the film festival takes place in a couple of weeks.

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