All on a Mardi Gras Day
2019 · 23m · USA
Directed by Michal Pietrzyk
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative, provocative, tender, tense
Big Chief Demond Melancon, leader of the Young Seminole Hunters tribe in New Orleans, spends an entire year hand-sewing an elaborate beaded and feathered suit that he will wear exactly once during Mardi Gras, competing among African-American men known as Mardi Gras Indians to determine who is "the prettiest." The film weaves his painstaking artistry with the broader story of gentrification displacing him and his community from their ancestral Ninth Ward neighborhood.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
23 minutes following Big Chief Demond hand-sewing a Mardi Gras Indian suit he'll wear once then dismantle, against displacement. The labor-as-resistance-as-art trifecta hits — and Pietrzyk earned the New Yorker placement honestly.
Pietrzyk follows Big Chief Demond Melancon through a year of beading a suit worn once — the labor-as-resistance grammar of Frederick Wiseman applied to a 200-year-old subculture born of Indigenous-Black solidarity. Essential.
New Yorker doc tracking a full year of Big Chief Demond Melancon hand-sewing a beaded suit worn exactly once, woven with gentrification displacement — the ephemerality of the suits is the entire metaphor for community under threat, and 23 minutes lets the labor itself read. 80K views.
Reviews
Demond fights with art. He rebels against the prison industrial complex, the alarming erosion of primarily black-owned homes, the parts of Mardi Gras entrenched in white supremacy — Pietrzyk renders it with the nuance it deserves.
Festivals
- Berlinale (Berlin International Film Festival) 2019, Nomination for Best Short Film
- Tribeca Film Festival 2019, Nomination for Best Documentary Short
- Seattle International Film Festival 2019, Grand Jury Prize
- Rhode Island International Film Festival 2019, Grand Prize
- Chicago International Film Festival 2019, Audience Award for Best Short Film
- Big Sky Documentary Film Festival 2019