“She decided she wanted to make a film about the connection she felt as an artist to this woman that she’d never met,” says Rene Broussard, Executive Director of the Zeitgeist Multi-Disciplinary Arts Center, about Helen Hill’s final film, The Florestine Collection.
Still from The Florestine Collection
Inspired by an unknown elderly dressmaker, Hill’s work was still unfinished when, on the early morning of January 4, 2007, she was murdered in her Marigny home by an unknown intruder. In the years since, Hill’s husband Paul Guiliunas has completed his wife’s film, and this week he returns to New Orleans for the first time since the murder for two screenings of The Florestine Collection at the New Orleans Film Festival.
The seeds of Hill’s film were found on the way to a Mardi Gras parade in a pile of trash, where she came across more than 100 handmade dresses. Falling in love with the dresses, Hill set out to learn more about them. She discovered that the dresses had been made by a blind woman in her 80s to make money through thrift store sales. When the woman passed away, the owner of her house had thrown out all of her belongings, including the dresses.
Inspired, Hill worked out a structure for an experimental, animated film about the story. She was helped along in 2004, when she won a hefty and prestigious Rockefeller Media Arts Fellowship grant, an award for which she had been nominated by Broussard. For the grant’s proposal, Hill mapped out the entire plot of the storyboard.
These plans were crucial after Hill’s murder for Guiliunas—who was also shot three times during the home invasion—to finish what his wife had begun. “If she hadn’t sent all that material to Rockefeller, it would have been impossible to recreate [the film] without her,” says Broussard. “Guiliunas could have paid homage to her, but this way he was able to really go back to her intentions and creative ideas to put the film together.” While much of the film and most of the dresses were damaged in the flooding after Hurricane Katrina, Guiliunas was able to complete the film with Hill’s original cut-out silhouettes and puppet animation, as well as with restored home movies that had been flood-damaged. Guiliunas made few changes to the original storyboard other than to include Hill’s murder in the film.
Almost five years after her death, Guiliunas is returning to New Orleans for the first time since the incident to present The Florestine Collection at this week’s New Orleans Film Festival.
Screenings of The Florestine Collection will be showing at the Contemporary Arts Center Tuesday, October 18 at 6 p.m. and at Zeitgeist Multi-Disciplinary Arts Center on Thursday, October 20 at 5:30 p.m. Guiliunas and other Hill family members will be in attendance at both showings.
