South of Ten

“One of the rare works of film or visual art made in the wake of Hurricane Katrina to look beyond the devastation of New Orleans, South of Ten is a small gem of a film that opens our eyes to the possibilities of other images, and other meanings, of this American tragedy. It catalogues a set of ordinary people and extraordinary actions – carrying a toilet, finding a trombone, lifting a house – by Mississippi survivors of the flooding, capturingthe charmed and terrible nature of survival. Without uttering a word, South of Ten asks: after all, what does it mean to act?” – Jonathan Kahana

“[South of Ten], like Akerman’s News From Home before it, flaunts the framing aspect of every single image, as if to foreground how the inhabitants who became migrants overnight in their own space had been framed.” – Mieke Bal

“Liza Johnson’s poetic, experimental short documentary South of Ten juxtaposes ten surrealistic and poignant sequences from individual lives, caught up in the wake of Hurricane Katrina’s destruction on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. These include: a man locating a trombone amid a pile of rubble, a relief worker gazing at the ocean from beneath a moving house, its owner watching from her (now mobile) living room, a girl absconding from a cluster of temporary tentlike shelters, and six additional haunting scenes.” – Nathan Southern

South of Ten has screened on the opening night of New York Film Festival, at the Rotterdam International Film Festival, the Walker Art Center, Full Frame Film Festival, the Henry Art Center, the International Flaherty Seminar, alongside activist events supporting the crisis in the Gulf Coast, and at many other festivals and art venues.

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