Ten years ago today, on January 4, 2007, New Orleans filmmaker Helen Hill was murdered by an intruder who broke into her home on North Rampart Street in the Marigny. Her husband, Paul Gailiunas, was shot three times as he shielded their two-year-old son (fortunately both of them survived the attack).
Hill was only 36-years-old when she was killed. She and Gailiunas had returned to the city just a few months earlier, having spent a year in South Carolina after evacuating for Hurricane Katrina. Hill was a talented animator and documentarian who, by all accounts, had fallen deeply in love with New Orleans, the city she had called home since 2000. At the time of her death she was working on The Florestine Collection, a documentary about a local seamstress whose dresses she had discovered along an Adams Street sidewalk a few years earlier.
Screengrab from “Scratch and Crow”
Hill’s murder, along with the killing of Hot 8 Brass Band drummer Dinerral Shavers the week before, sent shockwaves through New Orleans’ arts community. Their deaths came amid a particularly violent post-Katrina crime wave, and inspired thousands of people to march on City Hall the following week.
No one was ever charged with her murder.
I met Hill on a few occasions as a student at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, where she was a frequent guest instructor for the Media Arts program (NOCCA still gives out a scholarship, the Helen Hill Memorial Award in Media Arts, in her honor every year). Though I never had the chance to really get acquainted with her, it was clear that she was passionate and knowledgeable when it came to animation and experimental filmmaking. It was also clear that she was loved by many, and that her murder profoundly affected some of my teachers and classmates at NOCCA, just as it no doubt affected countless others in New Orleans and beyond.
I don’t recall seeing much of Hill’s work when I was a student, so it was a nice surprise to learn that some of her friends had digitized a bunch of her shorts and put them on the internet. As a film purist, she eschewed the use of digital video and made sure to shoot all of her works on old-fashioned celluloid. It was a choice that added another layer of beauty to her films, but one that probably made the task of uploading them a bit more difficult as well.
The digital versions of her works can now be found via the new Helen Hill page on Vimeo, which features a number of her animated, live-action and hybrid animated/live-action shorts. I’ve heard a lot about Hill’s joyous, fun-loving demeanor over the years, and this side of her shines through nearly all of these films. She had a penchant for using varied techniques to find whimsy in the mundane, or to examine themes like love and loss from rarely-explored angles. Watching her films has been an altogether enjoyable experience. I recommend others do the same.
Hill’s 1995 short Scratch and Crow, which you can view here, was added the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry in 2009. More of her films can be found via the new Vimeo page.
