The
films I most eagerly look forward to will not be documentaries but
works of pure fiction, played against, and into, and in collaboration
with unrehearsed and univented reality.
-James Agee
In some sense,
everyone already knows the story: a hurricane hits the coastal U.S.
People die. Houses are lost. Lives are completely rearranged. Some
leave town to make a new start and some stay to pick up the pieces.
Low and Behold not only explores this complex terrain; it was born
out of it.
In late August 2005, Hurricane Katrina wiped out the Gulf Coast.
Barlow Jacobs lived in New Orleans and evacuated to his childhood
home of Chattanooga, Tennessee. Like the rest of the city, he began
to put the pieces back together. During that time, a family friend
approached him about working as an insurance claims adjuster. Broke
and unsure of when he could return to New Orleans, he took the position
and worked for several months in the Gulf Coast, immersing himself
in the culture of the post-hurricane Coastal South. Immediately
aware of the potential, Barlow began working on a script that tells
the story of a young man who goes to New Orleans to do insurance
claims a few months after hurricane Katrina.
In February 2006, Barlow returned to New Orleans, with the plan
of investing all the money he had made claim adjusting into a feature
length film. He teamed up with Director and co-writer, Zack Godshall.
Godshall is a Louisiana native growing up only two hours west of
New Orleans in Lafayette. It was imperative to both Zack and Barlow
that the cast and crew were from New Orleans. They believed having
a team that had felt the full impact of Katrina would aid in bringing
the story to life in the most authentic way possible.
By May 2006, just eight months after Katrina had devastated New
Orleans, Low and Behold went into production.
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