Dual parts fictive creation and documentary, Low and Behold is so much more than a typical independent film. Telling a powerful story of rebuilding after Katrina, it's not just one about an insurance claims adjuster who has a heart or a man who has lost his dog. This is a film about how humanity pulls together—or doesn't—in the wake of disaster.

In frames filled with intimate rumble and lonely, littered streets, the film turns its eye toward hesitant, newbie claims adjuster Turner Stull (Barlow Jacobs) and genial although enigmatic Nixon (Eddie Rouse). Despite a rocky meeting, the two bond over the desolation, Nixon helping Turner with his adjustments, teaching him along the way how to be a better person, and Turner helping Nixon find his daughters' lost dog Crunchy and supporting a man, who for most of the film, stays in the shadow of all he emotionally witholds. As Jacobs delivers a quiet and moving performance as the emotionally invested outsider, Rouse, a David Gordon Green acting veteran, offers up his most heartbreaking role to date. His performance in the closing sequence of the film, in particular, is magnificent. The on-going joke throughout the film that Turner should do an adjustment on Nixon's house finally comes to fruition, and the viewers see the real Nixon at last; the vulnerable Nixon, the guilt-ridden Nixon, the husband and father who cannot—will not—come to grips with loss. So Turner, a mirror and a prism for the heavy emotion to reflect off, holds Nixon as he sobs in what used to be a living room, now covered in mold and stripped bare of all decoration. Just as Turner, with great confusion, recalibrates his understanding of human desperation, so too does the audience, and with nothing less than a great, deep sigh of sadness.

While on this layer the film is straight fictional narrative, the multitude of documentary interviews interspersed give the film true credence in telling the stories of those who were in New Orleans shortly after Hurricane Katrina. While previously uncommon to see the two styles blended successfully, its done here by first time feature director Zack Godshall, as it has been likewise with many of his contemporaries from North Carolina School of the Arts in other 2007 festival debuted films, with a huge amount of fluidity and grace, each part working off the other seamlessly. Writer-actor Jacobs said the crew didn't even actively look for interviews when they arrived in New Orleans only eight days after the tragedy. "People woke up in FEMA trailers and drove to the set every day", he mentions, "We let the stories come to us…we didn't really go searching for people."

As the film closes, a shaky cam drives out of Nixon's neighborhood gradually losing sight of the car in front of the camera until there is nothing but road, and we are left to contemplate loss and love, devastation and friendship. Low and Behold is not just a film about Hurricane Katrina. It is, yes, a film about telling the stories of those who otherwise could not have spoken after that great storm. But it is also a film about the resilience and fragility of humanity and the inherent awkwardness of interpersonal relationships in the wake of devastation. I can only hope that there is a distribution deal in its future.

For more information visit www.lowandbeholdmovie.com.

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