Djibouti

CHAPTER FOUR

THE FIRST DOCUMENTARY FILM Dara Barr shot on her own was called Women of Bosnia and it won an award at Cannes. Dara stayed on the women, no men in the picture identified, only the women after the men had used them.

She made Whites Only intercutting neo-Nazi white supremacists with Klansmen wearing robes of different shades. It won Best Documentary at Sundance: skinheads and coneheads exposing their racism to Dara's camera.

She walked out of her studio on Chartres in the Quarter and shot Katrina ripping through New Orleans, flooding much of the city, and her two sisters, divorced, left town together for Hot Springs, Arkansas. Her mother and dad, retired, living on St. Charles Avenue, thought of having their home repaired for the third time, sold the property and moved to Sea Island, Georgia. In the lull that followed the hurricane Dara's camera stayed on people who couldn't leave, homeless now, waiting for help that never came. Dara said she shot Katrina because there it was, outside. It won an Oscar.

The awards came during her first ten years making factual films, showing people's lives, getting them to talk about who they were. Dara was thirty-five at the time she began thinking about her next one.

Nuns? She found them in a convent, sisters who had taught her in grade school, a gathering of Brides of Christ, pressing their rosaries through withered fingers. Some still wore their habits. Not one Audrey Hepburn among them.

Try the other direction: a call girl talking about love for sale as she dresses to meet a john at one of the better hotels. She moves around the bedroom with her exposed breasts beginning to sag, telling Dara, "What do I do after, run a house? In New York it's a three-bedroom apartment on the West Side. Sit in the living room talking to the john waiting for the high-energy black girl. He's looking at Playboy. I was in Playboy when I was eighteen, before you had to shave your cooze and come off looking like a fucking statue. Is that what you want to make, a movie about me bitching?"

An idea came along from a guy who sold restaurant supplies in a town devoted to restaurants. Gerard, a nasty drunk before he found his Higher Power in AA and cleaned himself up. Gerard's idea-he'd even finance it-shoot AA meetings, the drunkalogues, a man or woman standing in the front of the room telling about harrowing situations inspired by booze. "I look up, I'm driving into traffic coming at me on the freeway, fast, nine o'clock Friday evening."

Dara had doubts, but listened to stories at meetings, heard recovering alcoholics being contrite, heard others tell their drunkalogues like they were doing stand-up. "I go out to wash the car, I'm in my bathing suit, and I come in the house smashed." One after another. "In two years I had three DUIs and did thirty days for driving without a license."

"Everything is told," Dara said. "These people are telling the film instead of showing it. They're doing monologues. Albert Maysles knew how to set a mood. He was seventy-eight when he made In Transit, got passengers on a train talking about intimate moments in their lives. But while they're telling, they're showing who they are. He got as close to his subjects as possible and seldom asked a question, never ever foreground himself in his scenes."

Gerard said, "So you don't want to shoot drunkalogues."

Dara became fixed on the pirates reading a three-column headline in the Times-Picayune: