The fall festival and new release schedule is so jam-packed that every week it seems like two or three new movies open that I’ve long wanted to see, but have had absolutely no time to watch a screener or go to a screening. The smaller the movie, the worse I feel when I have to let it slip through the cracks unseen. I really don’t care that I never made it to a screening of In The Valley of Elah; it breaks my heart that I didn’t get a chance to see The Last Winter before it opened, or that I saw Great World of Sound but didn’t have a chance to write about it between Sundance and its New York premiere last month.

This week, the two films that have unfortunately eluded my grasp are Tony Kaye’s abortion documentary Lake of Fire, which opens at Film Forum on Wednesday; and Desert Bayou, a documentary about Hurricane Katrina victims evacuated to a National Guard camp in Utah.

I’m planning to go see Fire on Wednesday and will have more to say after that. But Bayou has been on my gotta-see list since it screened at the Full Frame Film Festival in Spring of 2006, and as I’ve basically become obsessed with seeing every independent film about Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath that I can get my hands on, I really can’t wait to get a look at it. You can check out the trailer above; after the jump, you’ll find a synopsis of the film taken from its MySpace page. Bayou opens in New York on October 5 and in Los Angeles, Salt Lake City and Chicago on October 19.

Led by award winning filmmakers and technicians, and scored by some of the music industry’s finest talents, Bayou illuminates the horror and the humanity that has come to symbolize Hurricane Katrina. Our cameras followed two families from different backgrounds, but united by one thing: they were put on a plane and sent to a place where the culture was in direct contrast to their own. It is a fish out of water story-a story of resurrection, rebirth, of human beings helping one another and overcoming incredible odds. We didn’t follow convention-we didn’t impulsively go to New Orleans and collect the exact same footage that would soon be available through any news outlet. Instead, we went 1900 miles west and told a story that at first seemed to be a simple human-interest story lost on page six between the crime blotter, and the Mattress Warehouse 1/2 page sale advertisement! What we found was much more dynamic than any of us could have imagined. With only four days of preproduction, we arrived in Utah just days after the storm. We were forced to make this film solely on instinct, letting the story take us where it wanted us to go, instead of manufacturing an outcome. The resulting movie is well past “News”. Rather, it is unadulterated humanity played out against the backdrop of religion, politics, race, and two peoples forced together by a storm yet connected forever by necessity.