BLAM!²⁰⁰⁹

This short film was my senior project at the University of New Orleans in spring 2009. It screened once, at the annual student film festival.

I wrote it the previous September while evacuating for Hurricanes Gustav and Ike. At the same time, I was writing Cargo, a script based on John Frum of Vanuatu. The two works remain kin: part of the same constellation of ideas. Many of the seeds in BLAM! returned in later work, as did stylistic traces of the 1970s films which I was discovering and loving at the time.

The main character, Baraka Lamet, grew from a person I worked beside during summers cleaning on-campus apartments. His stories and observations became the seed of a fiction: an alternate life in which he had once been a television actor during the seventies.

The production nearly collapsed the day before filming. It survived because a few friends believed that we could make it with the resources at hand, and that we absolutely had to. Antonio McGill stepped into the role at the twenty-fifth hour. The four days that followed became an essential filmmaking experience.

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Cast & crew

Music & archival footage

“Big Easy” by Raphael Saadiq.
Stock footage from Prelinger Archives, used under Creative Commons license.

Special thanks

Mom and Dad, Snake and Jake’s Christmas Club Lounge, Bayou Bicycles, Jenn Gates, Noor Alhomsi, Devon, Michelle Kowalski, Lance Nichols, Nick Isom, Vicq, Sean Vincent Hager, Carmen Torres, Dixie Beer, Hamp Overton, Mike Alexander, Caitlyn Cooksley, Rob Racine.

This film was made in partial fulfillment of a degree at the University of New Orleans, Department of Film, Theatre and Communication Arts.