Oil Films

Filmmaker Jon Goldman returns to the bayou site of the award-winning 1948 film about oil exploration “LOUISIANA STORY” sixty years after its premiere and discovers the price of progress on the land and its people. “Oil in the Family” is a feature documentary about filmmaker Jon Goldman's attempt to understand his family's connection to oil and the 1948 film “Louisiana Story”. Using Robert J. Flaherty’s (“Nanook of the North”) masterpiece film as a point of reference he returns to the bayou sixty years after its premiere and discovers the price of progress on the land and its people. “Louisiana Story” follows a young boy whose bayou is visited by an oil rig and forever changing his family’s fortunes because of an oil lease. The classic movie parallels Goldman’s own Louisiana-based family who found oil on land which was actually used as part of the location in the 1948 filming. Goldman traces his family’s fortunes to rural Louisiana, and finds the boy of “Louisiana Story”, J.C. Boudreaux, now 75 years old and living in a FEMA trailer. It is there that he finds the current battles looming over hydrofracking, the process of extracting natural gas to be this generation’s environmental bête noir. “I want to start a conversation about consumption,” says Filmmaker and Woods Hole, Massachusetts resident Jon Goldman. “At the center of how we act as consumers, is a huge disconnect with how we value our natural world.”