New Orleans Film Society

Synopsis

Carolyn Parker was the last to leave her neighborhood when a mandatory evacuation order was decreed as Hurricane Katrina approached New Orleans in the summer of 2005. After the floodwaters subsided, Mrs. Parker was the first resident to return to her now flood-devastated community with what many thought was the “impossible dream” of bringing her ruined home back to life.
I’m Carolyn Parker: The Good, the Mad, and the Beautiful unfolds as an inspiring portrait of an extraordinary woman. Mrs. Parker takes us deep inside her personal biography as a child born in the 40s, raised in segregated New Orleans’ Lower 9th Ward, who became a teenager joining the front lines in the Civil Rights movement of the 60s, who worked for 30 years as a cook-turned-chef in the hotel industry, and became one of the most outspoken voices in the fight for every New Orleanians’ right to return home after the devastation of the floods that followed Katrina. That Carolyn faced these odds with unbridled wit, spirituality, and an abiding sense of social justice borne of her life in New Orleans makes for a unique cinematic tale of personal triumph. It’s the portrait of an “ordinary family” who banded together under extraordinary circumstances, and reclaimed their home.