WALKING ON DEAD FISH is a heart-felt documentary about a small-town high school football team and its “DISPLACED PLAYERS” who are thrown together by the powerful winds and floods of Katrina.

 

Located just 15 miles west of New Orleans, the tiny town of La Place, escaped the cruel flooding of its neighbor only to suffer a different kind of flood, the overnight influx of 20,000 displaced hurricane victims.  Electricity, food, water and shelter become scarce; traffic, unemployment and long lines prevalent.

 

The school system was overrun with 1700 displaced students. It’s under-funded high school, East St. John, took in 450 of these students, 20 of them football players.  Facing the daunting task of integrating players from rival programs into one school, one team, magnanimous Coach Larry Dauterive seemed optimistic.

 

“Football, right now it’s what’s going to bring southwestern Louisiana back together.  It’s a rally cry, like… 'The British are coming!'  Only here, it’s, 'Football is coming!'”  USA Today 9/15/05

                                                                     

With its first two games cancelled, the 20 “Displaced Players” join the team only four days before their first game.  Short on equipment and practice time, the Wildcats take the field wearing both home and away Jerseys.  It will prove to be only one of the many problems they will face throughout the season.

 

Can teenage boys blown together by the winds of Katrina overcome the tragedy of losing their homes and school?  Can kids with vastly different racial, economic and religious backgrounds co-exist?  Can one-time high schools rivals set aside these differences to band together and lift the spirit of this broken community?

 

One displaced player says, “Yes.”  Meet prep school transfer, Johnny Owen, the All-American looking tailback, who the 98% black team lovingly nicknames “White Bread” when he blazes past defenders for a 78-yard touchdown on his first carry.  But starting Tailback and Senior Captain, Stanley Jackson, is not so optimistic.   When his father loses his job due to Katrina, Stanley desperately needs a football scholarship to pay for college.  Expecting to be the star of the team, he sees his hopes and dreams of going to college fall apart as "White Bread" takes his playing time and spotlight.  Despite what seems to be an impossible situation, the “ghetto tough” kid does not respond by fighting or quitting.  Instead, he takes his frustrations out on his grandmother’s piano, composing music wrenched in soulful pain.  This pain eventually leads him to join his local church and play music that gives hope and inspiration to his congregation and community at large.

 

Each day, these young men face challenges that strike the core of who they are.  Challenges that go beyond the loss of their obvious material possessions and drill to a much deeper place, the soul.  They face problems that can break a team and family apart, but their Cajun-tough coach will not allow that to happen.  Demanding teamwork, togetherness and discipline, he becomes a father figure to many of the players who do not have one.  But, despite his fierce and often confrontational temper, most refer to the 65-year-old, simply as, “Papa Doe.”  With no other form of entertainment, the team becomes the center of the town’s recovery effort.  Friday nights become a time to forget hardship and racial divide and begin hope and recovery.

 

View the recovery of our country’s worst natural disaster through the eyes of a group of 16-year-old football players.  Sit back and ride the emotional roller coaster only a hurricane as powerful as Katrina could produce, in the uplifting and heart wrenching documentary, WALKING ON DEAD FISH.

Following the kids through a parking lot of a flooded school in New Orleans, I heard crackling beneath my feet.  The sound was not unlike the crunching of leaves, on an autumn day, in Princeton.  But this was different, the crackling echoed; the surrounding Mississippi seemed restless.  With each step, I felt bone like breaks beneath his feet.  Afraid to look down, I finally did....we weren’t walking on leaves on an autumn day in Princeton, we were “WALKING ON DEAD FISH.”

 

 

Having lunch with a friend, I told him that the fish served as a metaphor for what the people of New Orleans had to endure. Whether its walking on dead fish in order to get to school like my kids; or citizens walking around dead bodies, animals and garbage to get home, they had to walk over something in order to survive.  Later that day I went to the editing room and there it was....me stepping into three feet deep waste.  My sneakers were ruined.  I pulled them off and threw them into a garbage dumpster overflowing with foul water.  The impact caused the foulness to splash up on me.  I nearly lost it.  Caught on tape, I couldn't deny it.  It wasn't dead fish, but the point resonated and I finally understood what these people had do endure.  Walking on Dead Fish seemed to sum it all up.

 

                                                                                                                                (Franklin Martin, Director)