Product Description
-------------------
This film documents the triumph over leprosy by looking at one
of the most unusual communities in American history, Carville,""
a refuge for leprosy patients from all over the world. Crafted
from contemporary interviews, exclusive photographs and more, the
film takes viewers inside Carville, introducing them to patients,
doctors and staff who lived and worked there. The narratives are
underscored by original music by Grammy-winner Bela Fleck.
Review
------
Officially called U.S. Marine Hospital No. 66, the compound at
Carville
has for more than a century been an international destination for
patients
suffering from Hansen's disease, commonly known as leprosy.
Built around the remains of a run-down ation, the center
opened in 1894 and is still home to several patients.
Caused by a bacterium, the infectious disease -- a disfiguring
biblical scourge that's treatable due in part to research done at
Carville but still not entirely understood -- continues to
afflict about 200 Americans each year. Worldwide estimates are
poorly documented, but annual estimates of new diagnoses top
750,000.
That tiny Carville, about 60 miles upriver from New Orleans, came
to be a global nexus for patient care and is but one of
the stories told in "Triumph."
Staffed by Daughters of Charity nuns but administered by the
federal government, the center was a unique church-and-state
partnership that was both a haven and a kind of prison for
patients, some of whom were committed and confined there against
their will.
Old photos, radio broadcasts and newsreel-type films illuminate
the
first-person stories told by longtime patients, their offspring,
doctors,
staffers and administrators.
The stories are not always uplifting. According to the film,
locals didn't
universally welcome the hospital's residents, such were the
horrors of the disease's symptoms.
Says one former director of the center, "Let's put it this way:
They were treated like lepers."
And yet, according to a title card flashed early in the film,
none of the
workers at Carville ever caught the disease.
On the inside, life was lived as fully as it could be, as
evidenced by
stories about Mardi Gras and Christmas celebrations, weddings, a
patient-published newsletter, and the occasional breakout runs to
LSU football games or a nearby roadhouse.
One of the more heartbreaking facts of life at Carville was that
children
of married patients were removed to orphanages or foster care.
And yet, witnesses to life there interviewed for the film recall
its
heyday in mostly warm terms, despite such sometimes sad history.
(Decommissioned as a federal center in 1999 -- and after hosting
more than 5,000 resident patients -- it's now overseen by the
Louisiana National Guard.)
Among the outsiders interviewed are political
consultant/commentator
James Carville (who explains how the town got his family's name)
and former U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, who comments on
the lessons learned during the ill-conceived quarantine days.
The soundtrack, composed and performed by banjo master Bela Fleck
(aided bysuch killer players as bassist Edgar Meyer and dobro
virtuoso Jerry Douglas), is a haunting and subtle aural base
built around instrumentation including bass harmonica, wood flute
and clarinet.
The filmmakers are Sally Squires, a Washington Post reporter, and
John
Wilhelm, a former Time magazine science correspondent.
Squires began making reporting visits to Carville nearly two
decades ago. Her trips resulted eventually in a National Public
Radio documentary and now this troubling, challenging, beautiful
film. --The Times-Picayune by Columnist Dave Walker March 27,
2008