Event Name:  Les Vues Cultural Film Series
Location:  Vermilionville Performance Center
Date(s):  Jan 28, 2013
Time:  Starts: 6:30 PM  

Les Vues is a free monthly film series held the last Monday of the month at 6:30 p.m. in the Performance Center at Vermilionville. The film series is curated by filmmakers and enthusiasts, mostly from around the state. The films will range from features, documentaries, student film, shorts, animation, etc. that focus on the themes surrounding cultures. Following the movies will be an open discussion with the curator about the themes of the movie and how they apply to that culture.

Admission to the film series is free, but a suggested $5 donation will go towards screening and curating costs. Refreshments will be made available for this all ages film series. For more information call (337) 233-4077.

The month of January will be curated by Dr. Michael Martin from the Center for Louisiana Studies at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette who will be showing Ken Burns' Huey Long. Click here to view clips from the documentary.

ABOUT THE FILM
He was hailed as a champion of the poor and reviled as a dictator. Louisiana’s Huey Long rose to Governor and U.S. Senator on a platform of social reform and justice, all the while employing graft and corruption to get what he wanted. Ken Burns reveals a complex and comprehensive portrait of the man, his politics and the power he so obsessively sought.

HUEY LONG TIMELINE
Click here to view a timeline of Huey Long's life.

FROM THE DIRECTOR 
Huey Long was the first documentary I ever made that focused on one person's life to animate an entire film.
 
History, as the great essayist Thomas Carlyle once said, is in essence really biography. Sometimes we can understand an era best through the lives of the people who shaped that era – and who, in turn, were shaped by it.
 
When I set out to make this documentary, Huey Long had already been the basis for a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Robert Penn Warren and an Academy Award-winning feature film. But I believed that the true story of Huey Long's life could be just as compelling as any fictional work or any Hollywood movie.
 
As a filmmaker, I am interested in the power of history, and I am interested in its many, varied voices. Not just the voices of the old "top down" version of our past, which would try to convince us that American history is only the glossy, sanitized story of Great Men. And not just those pessimistic voices which seem to say that our history is merely a catalogue of crimes.
 
I am interested in listening to the voices of a true, honest, complicated past, unafraid of controversy and tragedy – but equally drawn to those stories and moments that suggest an abiding faith in the human spirit, and particularly the unique role this extraordinary country seems to have in the positive progress of mankind.
 
And so, for the last twenty-five years I have been drawn again and again to stories from our past – American stories that not only can help us understand our nation's history, but can also help us understand ourselves now.
 
He was a populist hero and a corrupt demagogue, hailed as a champion of the poor and reviled as a dictator. Louisiana’s Huey Long built his remarkable career as Governor and U.S. Senator on a platform of social reform and justice, all the while employing graft and corruption to get what he wanted. Long’s spellbinding personality and political machine might have taken him to the White House had he not been assassinated in 1935.
 
This finely crafted film by Ken Burns reveals a complex and comprehensive portrait of the man and the era, his politics and the power he so obsessively sought. Extensive archival footage and recollections by Louisianans who knew Long are juxtaposed with candid contemporary interviews with historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.; the late journalist I.F. Stone; and the late author Robert Penn Warren, whose magnificent novel All the King’s Men was inspired by the rise and fall of Huey Long.