Allison "Tootie" Montana:
Joyce Montana:
Darryl Montana:
Victor Harrison (Chief FiYiYi):
Reverend Goat Carson:
Fred Johnson:
Tootie's Last Suit
Information:
[TOOTI] | 2006 | 92 min | Feature Documentary
Directed by: Lisa Katzman
(Tootie's Last Suit)USA
New York Premiere
Interests: Documentary, Female Director(s)
Cast & Credits
Synopsis
Eighty-one-year-old Allison "Tootie" Montana is a New Orleans icon, famed for his brilliant handmade Mardi Gras costumes and renowned as a community leader for his onetime role as Big Chief of the Yellow Pocahontas Indian tribe. His family life, however, is undoubtedly more complicated. When he decides to come out of retirement to participate in one last carnival, a long-simmering conflict with his son (and heir apparent) Darryl erupts. As both vie for the spotlight, it becomes evident that they are fueled less by animosity than by a deep passion for their craft. For Tootie, the costumes are artistic creations as well as emblems of a long-standing family history; for Darryl, they are a means of self-expression but also a way of distinguishing his own carefully honed suit-making skills from those of his father. At once a riveting family drama and an insightful exploration of the history of Mardi Gras within the city's vibrant African American community, Tootie's Last Suit is above all a celebration of the resilient spirit of a man determined at all costs to preserve a vital tradition. Directed by Lisa Katzman, the movie includes footage of New Orleans filmed both before and after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. Copresented with Margaret Mead Film Festival.
---Beth Gilligan+About The Director
LISA KATZMAN is primarily a writer; Tootie's Last Suit is her first documentary. Ms. Katzman has written for numerous publications including: The New York Times, Village Voice, Film Comment, Interview, Los Angles Times, and Chicago Reader. Ms. Katzman has taught screenwriting and film courses at Bard College, and the Graduate Program of New York University. Her screenplay Rachel and Gerard is slated to be directed by Charles Burnett; she is currently developing two other feature projects and a documentary, while continuing to work as a journalist.
+Director Statement
Though the subculture of the Mardi Gras Indians is unique to New Orleans, like jazz - which grows out the same cultural soil of Congo Square- it is also quintessentially American. It is a fantastically imaginative merging of Native American and African traditions that include beading, drumming, and ancestor worship. Beginning in the late 19th century under Jim Crow law, Mardi Gras Indians answered white supremacy and racist exclusion with a spirit of inclusiveness; over time they embraced, for instance, the Sicilian festival of St. Joseph (the patron Saint of the poor), and made it their own.
I think it's tempting for modern "rootless cosmopolitans" to romanticize "traditional" cultures, to imagine that the passing of the baton from one generation to the next is a graceful and seamless act of transmission. But of course traditional cultures are as fraught with intergenerational tension as any other social arrangement. Making Tootie's Last Suit vividly brought home to me that all cultural traditions are larger than the flawed personalities that create
them. It caused me to reflect on how one purpose of our distinctly human genius for creating art and culture is to hold our humbling contradictions, and perhaps render them not only bearable, but also beautiful. From my perspective, the father-son rivalry, and displays of ego that emerge in the story may seem at odds with, but they don't diminish, the larger values of Mardi Gras Indian culture-which are enduringly spiritual, anti-commercial, and community-based. In spite of his all-too-human shortcomings, it is these values that Tootie Montana represented
for over 50 years, and which his heirs, notably his son Chief Darryl Montana, and Chief Victor "FiYiYi" Harris, stand for so crucially today in post-Katrina New Orleans.
