PATOIS 2024
Join us for THE 2024 PATOIS FESTIVAL - Our 21st year!
Wednesday, March 6 - Sunday, March 10, 2024
Special Opening Night Event March 6 at the marigny opera house
March 7-10 at The Broad TheateR
Festival Program Below!
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Wednesday March 6 2024
Wednesday, March 6, 6:30pm - The Marigny Opera House
“Get in Loser, We’re Freeing Palestine”: Making the Liberation Movement Irresistible
For five months, the world has witnessed unthinkable genocide in Gaza. Throughout these dark times, New Orleans’ own Palestinian community have shown us what steadfastness, resistance, and true solidarity look like. Join us for an evening of conversation with four of the leaders of our local movement, Adan Murad, Mohammad Alkurd (Mo Munchies), Allen Esmail, and Thafer Danial, as they share with us how they are making the Palestinian justice struggle an irresistible movement of liberation.
Partner: Palestine Film Day
Thursday March 7 2024
Thursday, March 7, 6:30pm - The Broad Theater
Premiere SECRET OPENING NIGHT FILM (102 min)
Direct from its world premiere at Sundance 2024, the film Amazon doesn’t want you to see, with a post screening discussion featuring workers who formed a union at Amazon, and New Orleans Dollar Store workers organizing here, facilitated by Kali Akuno of Cooperation Jackson.
On April 1, 2022 a group of ordinary workers made history when they did what everyone thought was impossible: they successfully won their election to become the very first unionized Amazon workplace in America. This feat would be extraordinary for any union, let alone the Amazon Labor Union (ALU), who did it with no prior organizing experience, no institutional backing, and a total budget of $120,000 raised on GoFundMe. Heralded as the most important win for labor since the 1930s, this highly cinematic documentary captures the ALUs historic grassroots campaign to unionize thousands of their co-workers from day one of organizing.
Partners: Step Up LA
Thursday, March 7, 8:00 pm - The Broad Theater
Antenna: Draw-a-thon Pop-up!
Join Patois and Antenna in the Broad Theater lobby through-out the evening with a special Draw-A-Thon pop-up! Come for one or both of the films and continue the conversation through visual expression. The Pop-up will continue throughout the festival.
Thursday, March 7, 9:15pm - The Broad Theater
Rebel Dykes (85 min)
A rabble-rousing documentary set in 1980s post-punk London, REBEL DYKES reveals the explosion that happened when punk met feminism. The film follows a tight-knit group of friends who met at Greenham Common peace camp and went on to become artists, performers, musicians, and activists in London. A heady mash-up of animation, archive footage and interviews tells the story of a radical scene: squatters, BDSM nightclubs, anti-Thatcher rallies, protests demanding action around AIDS and the fierce ties of chosen families. This is an extraordinarily privileged glimpse into a bygone world by those who not only lived out their politics with heartfelt conviction but lived to tell the tale.
Directed by Harri Shanahan & Siân A. Williams.
Friday March 8 2024
Friday, March 8, 7:00pm - The Broad Theater
No Cop Academy (59 min)
Post-screening discussion featuring Chicago Youth organizers Destiny Bell and Destiny Harris, Director Caullen Hudson, and Producer David A. Moran, moderated by Nziki Wiltz, Voters Organized to Educate.
Tickets Here.
From 2017-2019, Chicago Black youth and other youth of color powerfully organized and led an effort against the construction of a $95 million dollar cop academy, and demanded the city of Chicago fund youth and communities instead. This documentary chronicles the explosive #NoCopAcademy campaign through those who lived it.
Directed by Caullen Hudson, Produced by Caullen Hudson, David A. Moran, Debbie Southorn
ALAM (2022) SUMMARY: Despite being part of a young generation of Palestinians whose families chose to stay and challenge the Israeli state after Al-Nakba, 17-year-old Tamer and his friends are just like any other group of teenage boys. They clumsily search for drugs, flirt with girls, play video games, and slack off at school. However, when a beautiful new student named Maysaa joins their class Tamer immediately falls for her and, by association, is drawn into her political activism. Together they join fellow classmate, Safwat, in an operation to covertly raise the Palestinian flag and peacefully disrupt the local celebrations planned for Israels Independence Day otherwise known to Palestinians as a day of mourning and memorialization for their displacement 70 years prior. Unsure of his own political convictions, Tamer must quickly determine what matters to him and what price he is willing to pay for freedom. A skillful examination of the fraught political awakening young Palestinians are forced to undergo, this TIFF World premiere perfectly captures teenage fearlessness and bravado along with a certain cluelessness about how the real-world works (Variety). An striking debut feature film from Firas Khoury, ALAM marries conversations around nationalism and iconography with the universal themes of growing up. Director: Firas Khoury Starring: Mahmoud Bakri, Sereen Khass, Saleh Bakri, and Mohammad Karaki
ZOO (2022) SUMMARY: As Sami is wandering through the worst zoo in the world while looking for his ball, he crosses paths with a little tiger named Laziz, which follows him on his quest to find a safe place to play. Against all odds, they become friends. But the remnants of war harbor danger. Animated. Director: Tariq Rimawi
Saturday March 9 2024
Saturday, March 9, 2:00pm - The Broad Theater
Fannie Lou Hamer's America (59 min)
Post-screening discussion between Deon Haywood of Women With a Vision and Shana M. griffin of PUNCTUATE.
Tickets here.
Fannie Lou Hamer was a leader in the civil rights movement, founder of the Freedom Democratic Party in Mississippi, and the organizer of Freedom Summer, a volunteer-based campaign launched in the summer of 1964 in order to register as many Black voters in Mississippi as possible. FANNIE LOU HAMERS AMERICA, a documentary produced by her grand-niece Monica Land, and winner of Best TV Feature Documentary or miniseries at the IDA Awards, is a portrait of a civil rights activist and the injustices in America that made her work essential. Through public speeches, personal interviews, and powerful songs of the fearless Mississippi sharecropper-turned-human-rights-activist, Fannie Lou Hamers America explores and celebrates the lesser-known life of one of the Civil Rights Movements greatest leaders. Directed by Joy Davenport, Produced by Monica Land
Partners: PUNCTUATE.
Saturday, March 9, 4:30pm - The Broad Theater
Doubles (95 min) & Buzz (20mIN)
Featuring a post-screening discussion with filmmaker Ian K. Harnarine.
Tickets for both Doubles and Buzz here.
Doubles (91 minutes) (2023)
In small-town Trinidad, Dhani is a dissatisfied man in his early 20s. He hangs out at bars with his high rolling friends, but he doesn’t belong. Dhani always leaves the party early so that he can work the nightshift with his feisty mother, Sumintra, selling Doubles, the famous Trinidadian street-food. The two share the same dream of opening their very own brick-and-mortar restaurant.After getting humiliated by a girl and Sumintra getting robbed at knife point, Dhani has lost his patience and decides to go to Toronto to confront his father.
Written and Directed by Ian Harnarine, Produced by Mark Sirju, Cast: Sanjiv Boodhu, Errol Sitahal
Language: English
Buzz (20 minutes)
A short drama from Sudan about the end of an elderly woman’s life.
Directed by Mohamed Fawi, Produced by Amjad Abualala, Mohamed Alomda, & Mohamed Fawi
Screenwriter: Mohamed Fawi, Ahmed Shaweesh, Noura Adil
CInematographer: Mansour Omer
Cast: Jasour Abuelgasim, Zahra Mansour, Ali Abdalgafar.
Saturday, March 9, 7:00pm - The Broad Theater
Kanaval: A People's History of Haiti in Six Chapters (75 min)
Post-screening discussion with Co-Director Leah Gordon and New Orleans musician and culture worker Bruce “Sunpie” Barnes
KANAVAL (2022)
Kanaval is a visually arresting award-winning feature documentary that is set in the present but tells the rich story of Haitis past, as we follow a number of carnival performers in the lead up to and during the annual Jacmel Mardi Gras. These performers relate their own personal histories as well as the stories of their carnival characters, representing moments and people from the distant and not so distant Haitian past. Interwoven with the interviews, testimonies and observational footage, is archive material drawn from a wide variety of sources to enhance our understanding of Haitian history and culture from the time of the indigenous Taino through to the present day.
Directed by Leah Gordon & Eddie Hutton Mills, Produced by Natasha Dack Ojumu & Leah Gordon.
Saturday, March 9, 9:00pm - The Broad Theater
Acsexybility (87 min)
Acsexybility is a documentary that tells stories about the sexuality of people with disabilities. Through the characters' conversation with the director, as well as scenes where they act out their desires, the film explores flirting, kissing, dating, masturbation, ableism and, of course, sex. Its greatest strength is hearing from people with disabilities things that society does not expect them to say and do. We want to change the idea that they are asexual, angelic, special and even devoid of desires.
Sunday March 10 2024
Sunday, March 10, Noon - Contemporary Arts Center
Gestures of Refusal Curatorial Walkthrough - free event
Join us for a walkthrough of the exhibition Gestures of Refusal: Black Photography and Visual Culture, with the exhibition’s curator and PATOIS Collective member Shana M. griffin.
Sunday, March 10, 3:30pm - The Broad Theater
Reproductive Justice Event:
With a Vengeance: The Fight for Reproductive Freedom (38 MIN) & In Accordance With (7 MIN)
Special Reproductive Justice Event featuring films and local reproductive justice organizers.
Tickets for this Reproductive Justice Event Here.
WITH A VENGEANCE: The Fight for Reproductive Freedom (1989)
An urgent and timely history of the struggle for reproductive freedom since the 1960s, reflecting the wider history of the contemporary women's movement. Rare archival footage and interviews with early abortion rights activists, including members of Redstockings and the JANE Collective, are intercut with young women who testify to the need for multi-racial grassroots coalitions. Flo Kennedy and Byllye Avery exemplify African American women's roles as leaders, making connections between racism, reproductive freedom and healthcare for the poor.
Directed by Lori Hiris
In Accordance With (2020)
At a border check point, pregnant people are forced to endure invasive and emotionally abusive measures in order to get an abortion. The dialogue in this film is taken verbatim from State-mandated anti-choice materials, and imagines a world in which the territory of the body and the territory of the nation are collapsed into one space. Ultimately, the film explores whether this fictional world is really that different from the one we live in now.
This film is almost entirely scripted from real anti-choice, State-mandated legal materials called "Women's Right to Know Act" pamphlets, which are currently provided to women in clinics across the U.S. to dissuade them from having abortions. With individual states using Covid-19 as an excuse to ban abortions, the uncertainty of the presidential election looming, and Amy Coney Barretts supreme court confirmation pending, legal abortion is in the cross hairs yet again. Abortion is already severly restricted in the U.S., especially for people of color and those with lower incomes, but in Post Roe America these restrictions could expand to outright bans in up to 21 states. We hope to use this film to further understanding about what it is like for pregnant people to access abortions in this country and generate empathy and passion to move the movement for legal, safe, and easy access to abortion forward.
Directed and Produced by Sarah Ema Friedland and Alessandra Lacorazza, in co-production with the Meerkat Media Collective
Sunday, March 10, 5:00pm - The Broad Theater
Notes on Displacement (75 min)
Post-screening discussion with filmmaker Khaled Jarrar; Sabrine Abed, Human Rights Attorney; & Fatima Khan, ISLA Immigrant Justice Fellow.
Notes on Displacement (2022)
The news is full of images of overcrowded boats and vast tent camps. But how much do we really know about what refugees are going through? Notes on Displacement takes a deep dive by following a single family on a grueling journey across Europe. Their fear, disorientation, and solidarity is palpable. Filmmaker Khaled Jarrar has his personal reasons for going through this experience in order to eliminate, in his own images, the distance so dominant in Western media coverage. He worms his way through the thronging crowds, gets lost in the night with his group, discovers how dangerous language barriers can be, and wanders around in the dehumanizing camps. And in a sense healing with the viewer becomes a true member of this family. Directed by Khaled Jarrar.
Sunday, March 10, 7:00pm - The Broad Theater
Closing Night Films: Tomorrow’s Freedom (97 min) & Mar Mama (15 min)
Tickets for both Tomorrow’s Freedom and Mar Mama here.
Tomorrows Freedom (2022) - A story of Palestine's most famous political prisoner. Combining unfolding events on the ground, in-depth interviews and powerful archive spanning over 30 years - we see Marwan Barghouthi's evolution from activist to learned politician, uniting people and bringing hope to a flatlined peace process. If given a chance, could Barghouthi pave the way for an inclusive and democratic future and peace between Israel and Palestine? TOMORROWS FREEDOM, made over the course of 5 years, gains intimate access to the family of Barghouthi. Through the Barghouthi family and interviews from the people who know Marwan best, Tomorrows Freedom takes you on a brutally honest and transformative journey into the heart of the Israel Palestine conflict, speaking to Palestinians and Israelis. Directed by: Sophia Scott & Georgia Scott
Mar Mama (2023) - In this beautiful and intimate drama, a father tries to distract his young daughter from the realities of life under occupation.Directed by Majdi El Omari.