30th Annual New Orleans Film Festival Underway in Crescent City

Piers Kids, Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street, Always in Season and Mossville: When Great Trees Fall among docs playing this weekend

The 30th annual New Orleans Film Festival enters its opening weekend with dozens of fiction and nonfiction films on tap.

Friday night will see the festival debut of Pier Kids, the documentary by Elegance Bratton about homeless LGBTQ youth in New York who build community in an area along the Hudson River. Friday's schedule also features a screening of Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street, directed by Roman Chimienti and Tyler Jensen.

Scream, Queen! focuses on actor Mark Patton, "the first male scream queen," who starred in the 1985 sequel to A Nightmare on Elm Street, A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge. The horror flick appeared poised to make a star of Patton, but the documentary argues homophobia preempted that. In recent years Patton has overcome that earlier disappointment to become a "gay horror icon," according to the festival program guide.

"Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street." Courtesy New Orleans Film Festival

Among fictional fare, the acclaimed historical drama Portrait of a Lady on Fire, directed by Céline Sciamma, screens Friday evening. 

Returning to documentary programming, Saturday's schedule includes the screening of Mossville: When Great Trees Fall, directed by Alexander Glustrom. It's a disturbing story of environmental racism set in a historic Louisiana town that witnessed black residents involuntarily displaced when petrochemical companies wanted their land to build giant refineries. All of this happened with the blessing of then Governor Bobby Jindal.

In my opinion it's one of the best documentaries of the year. The tragic hero of the film, Stacey Ryan, defied the petrochemical invaders to remain the last resident of Mossville.

Stacey Ryan, the tragic hero of "Mossville: When Great Trees Fall," attends the world premiere of the documentary at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in Durham, North Carolina. April 6, 2019. Photo by Matt Carey

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Related:
>The Mossville filmmaking team on the dimensions of environmental racism and 'fence line communities': 'This is an international issue... It's the global south.'

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Always in Season, winner of the Special Jury Award for Moral Urgency at the Sundance Film Festival, makes its New Orleans Film Festival debut Saturday at noon (with an encore screening on Monday). Jacqueline Olive's documentary explores the shattering history of racial lynchings in America, and the 2014 death of an African-American teenager in Georgia found hanging from a swing set.

Rodney Evans' Vision Portraits and Gay Chorus Deep South, directed by Charles David Rodrigues, are among the documentaries screening at the festival on Sunday. Gay Chorus Deep South was recently acquired by MTV's documentary films division, under the new direction of Sheila Nevins, the former longtime head of HBO Documentary Films.

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Related:
>Sight and insight: Director Rodney Evans on his personal, poetic Vision Portraits

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Rodney Evans, director of "Vision Portraits," rides the subway in New York. Photo by Kjerstin Rossi

For full details on the New Orleans Film Festival schedule, click here.