South of Ten (2006)

Directed by: Liza Johnson | 10 minutes | drama, short film

A girl cycles furiously past a huge pile of concrete pipes, without looking up or back she rides through the devastated landscape. She doesn’t seem impressed. It’s one of the statues from ‘South of Ten’. This short film paints a picture of the situation around the Mississippi Gulf Coast, the region that was hit by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Liza Johnson is both a writer and filmmaker. Her short films have already been screened at various film festivals. For example, ‘South of Ten’ premiered on the opening night of the New York Film Festival in 2006. Her other films include ‘Good Sister/Bad Sister’ (1996), ‘Giftwrap’ (1998) and ‘If Then Maybe’ (2004). She wanted to show a different picture of Katrina’s victims in ‘South of Ten’ than the images everyone had seen on the news. For this reason, she does not use interviews in her short film, but portrays people by showing how they deal with the disaster. Next to the cycling girl we see images of people who are busy rebuilding their house and people who are camping in their half-destroyed house. Despite the fact that the film is not a documentary, ‘South of Ten’ shows a realistic picture of the situation around the Mississippi Gulf Coast. This is because Johnson based her screenplay on stories from residents of the area and let these non-actors play scenes themselves.

‘South of Ten’ shows that it doesn’t always take long films to make a powerful statement. The film also shows that feature films are not by definition better at sketching a situation than a short film. Apart from that, Johnson also shows us that words are not always necessary for a film. The images that we see for ten minutes make clear the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina around the Mississippi Gulf Coast and how the residents of this area are dealing with it. She does this in such a way that the images remain in your memory for a long time, something that cannot be said of many films.