Faubourg Tremé: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans
Lolis Eric Elie, a New Orleans newspaperman, takes us on a tour of the city – his city – in what becomes a reflection on the relevance of history folded into a love letter to the storied New Orleans neighborhood, Faubourg Tremé. Arguably the oldest black neighborhood in America and the birthplace of jazz, Faubourg Tremé was home to the largest community of free black people in the Deep South during slavery and a hotbed of political ferment. Here black and white, free and enslaved, rich and poor cohabitated, collaborated, and clashed to create America's first Civil Rights movement and a unique American culture. Faubourg Tremé: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans is a riveting tale of heartbreak, hope, resiliency and haunting historic parallels.

While the Tremé district was damaged when the levees broke, this is not another Katrina documentary. Long before the flood, two native New Orleanians—one black, one white—writer Lolis Eric Elie and filmmaker Dawn Logsdon, began documenting the rich living culture of this historic district. Miraculously, their tapes survived the disaster unscathed. The completed film, Faubourg Tremé: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans, which critics have called "devastating", "charming", and "revelatory" is a powerful testament to why New Orleans matters, and why this most un-American of American cities must be saved.

Lolis Eric Elie is an award-winning newspaperman and accomplished author. Since 1995, he has chronicled the heartbeat of New Orleans' neighborhoods for New Orleans' major daily newspaper, The Times-Picayune.

A recognized expert on New Orleans food and culture, Lolis is the author of Smokestack Lightning: Adventures in the Heart of Barbecue Country, a book about the culture of barbecue.He produced a television documentary based on that book and has several other culinary documentaries in development.

He is currently writing Of Bondage & Memory, a book on the enduring legacy of the slave trade on two continents. He is editor of Cornbread Nation 2: The Best of Southern Food Writing for University of North Carolina Press and is a contributing writer for Oxford America, Gourmet, and other national publications.

As a producer for the Smithsonian Institute's Jazz Oral History Project, Lolis conducted interviews with many of New Orleans' elder jazz musicians.

Lolis is a current Soros Katrina Media Fellow awarded by the Open Society Institute and is currently a contributing writer on the HBO television series Tremé, directed by David Simon. He has master's degrees from the Columbia School of Journalism in New York and a Master's in Creative Writing from the University of Virginia. He and his father live in the Tremé and have become key figures in the area's cultural renaissance.

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