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Daily News
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A Little Piece of Tragedy
Just one month after Bethany Ashton Wolf wrapped her directorial debut, a hurricane that went by a name other than Katrina destroyed each and every one of her Louisiana locations.
Monday, September 24, 2007 at 11:25 AM
By FilmStew Staff
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LittleChenier.com
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Director, co-writer Beth Ashton Wolf
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Remember the 2001 drama Don’s Plum? That’s OK, few people do, even though it co-starred Leonardo DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire and Entourage regular Kevin Connelly.
Now, six years later, that film’s co-writer and co-producer Bethany Ashton Wolf has a feature length directorial debut that is winning awards on the film festival circuit. Titled Little Chenier, this bayou drama focuses on a pair of backwater brothers and was also written by Wolf together with her brother, Jace Johnson, who like she hails from Lake Charles, Louisiana.
“I was looking for my next screenplay to write,” Wolf, a writer-director of several short films, recalls. “My brother had written a short story about two brothers, Beauxregard and Pemon, set in the bayous of Louisiana. I immediately fell in love with the concept.”
The website for the film, which takes its name from the strip of local bayou land of the same name, dramatically depicts as an example how one of the locations used for the film was completely obliterated by Hurricane Rita, a Category 3 storm than followed in the wake of Katrina in September, 2005. Wolf, her brother and their family are responsible for the organization Rita Remembered, a non-profit dedicated to helping those affected by the storm rebuild.
Rita hit exactly one month after Wolf wrapped Little Chenier and essentially leveled the entire community of Little Chenier. It was, and is, no more. Little Chenier, which translates from the French word “chene” as ‘Little Oak, is also where Ashton and her brother were taught to fish by their father.
This spring, Little Chenier won the Best Picture and Best Ensemble Acting awards at the 2007 Phoenix Film Festival. It will hit theaters in New Orleans, New York and elsewhere in limited release beginning this December.
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