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.
