Veins in the Gulf (76 minutes, 2011) is a documentary, produced, directed, and edited by Elizabeth Coffman and Ted Hardin, that traces the environmental crisis of southern Louisiana, the history of Cajun culture, and rapidly disappearing bayous. We witness the community trying to solve its environmental crisis and relentlessly searching for strategies to restore the coastline.
For the past seven years, Elizabeth Coffman and Ted Hardin have been working on Veins in the Gulf, a film about the disappearance of the Cajuns’ homelands. Now, thanks to the BP oil disaster, the eyes of the world are once again turned on this ravaged region, and the filmmakers have an opportunity to place the latest crisis in the broader context of its impact on the region’s ecosystem and on the communities living through it.
After something like 20 trips to the region, the couple returned to Louisiana this month and encountered plenty of anger among the people they’ve been following—but not necessarily directed where you’d expect. “They’re not mad at BP, they’re mad at the federal government for putting a halt to the offshore drilling,” Coffman says. “They compare it to a mining accident—you don’t shut down an entire industry because of one accident.” “Cajuns have this history of cultural and religious repression,” Coffman says. “They feel like expatriates in their own country.”
Read more: Mourning the Bayou
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