 |
|
Glen Pitre
Born November 10th, 1955, at Cut Off, Louisiana, Glen Pitre worked his way through Harvard by fishing shrimp each summer. By age 25, American Film magazine dubbed him “father of the Cajun cinema” as his low-budget, French dialect “gumbo westerns” broke house records in bayou country theaters. With the help of the Sundance Institute, his internationally-lauded 1986 Belizaire the Cajun became his first English-language production. Since then Pitre's works in a variety of media, frequently in collaboration with wife Michelle Benoit, often about life in his native Louisiana wetlands, have earned him numerous awards, including an honorary doctorate and a knighthood from France. In 2003, Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert acclaimed Pitre “a legendary American regional director.”
DOWNLOAD Vitae |
|
Michelle Benoit
A Scots-Irish-Cajun from Lake Charles on the southwestern Louisiana prairies, Michelle Benoit has earned degrees from the American University in Paris and the University of New Orleans. She has worked as a catering and sales manager of a four-star hotel in Washington DC, New Orleans city tour guide, assistant to an international interior designer, and personal secretary to a nationally-known voodoo priestess, while managing concerts, theatrical productions, and dance workshops. Over the last seventeen years she has written, produced and directed films, documentaries, books, articles, museum exhibits, and videos often in conjunction with her writing partner and husband Glen Pitre. She is currently Artist-in-Residence for Screenwriting and Film Directing at the University of New Orleans.
DOWNLOAD Vitae
|
So where’s the name “Côte Blanche” come from?
Late in the 19th Century, the largest settlement on the Louisiana coast was a fishing town called Cheniere-Caminada. October 1st, 1893, a hurricane came ashore and drowned over half of Cheniere’s 3,000 residents. The grief-stricken survivors abandoned the settlement to move inland, many relocating to the village of Cut Off on Bayou Lafourche.
In those days, it was custom along the bayou to paint the front of your house (yes, only the front) the gaudiest color you could find. From the decks of paddle-wheel packet boats, passengers would oh and ah over red houses, blue houses, pink houses, purple houses... Until they reached the settlement where lived the hurricane refugees who, having lost all in the storm, could only afford whitewash for their homes. The startling lack of color gave the place its name, Côte Blanche, the white coast.
It was there, in the Côte Blanche section of the town of Cut Off, that Glen Pitre grew up hearing the tales that the company Côte Blanche Productions continues to retell to this day. |
 |
