With extensive footage of of jazz funerals and Sunday second-line parades filmed over a twenty-five year span, along withriveting reenactments of the burial dances of enslaved Africans, City of a Million Dreams shows the cultural memory of Black New Orleans and rituals of resilience as never before. Berry published a book with the same title in 2018 upon the tricentennial of New Orleans’ founding.

The film includes Deb Cotton, an African American and observant Jew, who leaves “hard-hearted Hollywood” for New Orleans and becomes a chronicler of the parading clubs spawned by 19th-century burial societies. Her zeal for the city grows as she becomes a blogger for Gambit Weekly, adopting the handle “Big Red Cotton.” As Cotton explores her adopted culture, Dr. Michael White, a prolific clarinetist and New Orleans native, plays “the widow’s wail” on his clarinet, a cry of lamentation in the funeral marches. White’s transcendent music also includes joyous peals for the soul’s cutting-loose, which happens when the band leaves the cemetery, followed by dancers in what New Orleanians call “the second line.” Risen in the ranks of brass bands, White, too, is on a journey of self-discovery, seeking clues about his ancestor who played at the dawn of jazz. White says of jazz funerals: “For someone dealing with American racism and trying to figure out your place in this life…you can be transformed into another world that really sets you free.”

Funerals unfold as caravans of memory, shaping White’s quest and Cotton’s epiphanies. New Orleans burial customs evolve as people of different tongues and colors reach the city, surviving floods, fires, war, political violence, civil rights struggles and hurricanes. The film follows the French-colonial town’s evolution with a stunning recreation of African burial choreographies by enslaved people, honoring ancestral memory on a field called Congo Square. The resistance drama of danced memory carries across time, gathering force as as black men march as Mardi Gras Indians in one the film’s most powerful funeral sequences.

Tickets available to purchase at this link. The film will also be available to stream online following the kickoff event.