“Mossville: Where Great Trees Fall” shows the heartbreaking forced sacrifices of a community struggling to exist
HANCEVILLE, Ala. — Mossville, Louisiana—once a vibrant community—is now a contaminated wasteland with a few lone holdout residents struggling to maintain their history against the relentless advancement of corporate interests. Their story is told in the documentary film, “Mossville: Where Great Trees Fall.”
The Evelyn Burrow Museum at Wallace State Community College is hosting a screening of the film with the filmmakers, Alexander Glustrom, Daniel Bennett, Katie Mathews, Michelle Lanier, and Catherine Rierson, who will present a Q&A with the audience following the screening. The public is invited to attend on Tuesday, March 10 at 6 p.m., in the Burrow Center Recital Hall.
Stacey Ryan promised his dying parents that he would protect Mossville, an historic Louisiana community built by formerly enslaved people and free people of color. Surrounded by 14 petrochemical plants, Mossville now faces a new threat from a proposed multi-billion-dollar project to construct a chemical plant—the largest in the western hemisphere.
In the past 10 years, Ryan has lost many family members and neighbors to cancer, but he refuses to leave his home. The cost of resistance is high; his power, water and sewage have been cut off and he is having health problems from chemical exposure. Even more worrying, Ryan has a 5-year-old son to consider. As a chemical company encroaches on citizens’ property with buyout offers, Ryan and other community members have to decide whether to exist in a chemical war zone or abandon the land that has been in their families for generations.
“The first time I crossed the Calcasieu River and gazed out at the mesmerizing panorama of industrial structures, I was both enthralled and terrified,” said the film’s director and editor Glustrom. “At the center of this apocalyptic world lay the remnants of Mossville, a community that was once a safe haven for generations of people, a space that once represented self-sufficiency and resilience … My hope is that the film can alter audiences’ perspectives, as it has my own, and force people to reckon with the realization of who most often bears the burden of our energy consumption and production.”
This event is made possible through the Southern Circuit Tour of Independent Filmmakers, a South Arts program. Since its inception in 1975, Southern Circuit has brought some of best independent filmmakers and their films from around the country to communities throughout the South. The program is supported by the National Endowment for the Arts.
Admission to the screening is free, which includes a Q&A with the filmmakers following the film. Information is available at www.burromuseum.org or by calling 256.352.8457.
View the film’s trailer here: https://vimeo.com/145085489
