Directed by filmmaker and National Geographic adventurer Jon Bowermaster, SoLa is a timely environmental documentary highlighting both the striking beauty and startling degradation of Southern Louisiana over recent years. Through a series of “water stories” related by Louisiana residents, the hour-long film covers a range of ecological issues, accidents, and dilemmas. Bowermaster situates large-scale disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and the Deepwater Horizon spill alongside long-term problems such as petrochemicals and Cancer Alley, the erosion of coastlands, the loss of cypress forests to logging, and the damage to wetlands by a ten-thousand-mile web of oil and gas canals. The storytellers are mostly activists, either community-based social-justice advocates such as Marylee Orr, executive director of the Louisiana Environmental Action Network; devoted nature defenders, such as Dean Wilson of the Waterkeeper Alliance, who came to the Atchafalayo Basin wetlands en route to the Amazon and stayed; or marine scientists, including Ivor van Heerden, notable for his lambasting of the Army Corps of Engineers for their “shoddy engineering” and role in Hurricane Katrina. The “villains” are, meanwhile, the usual suspects of corporate America (and beyond): BP, Exxon, Walmart, and so on.

As a mix of grand narrative and personal story, SoLa keeps audience interest high, but on occasion lacks cohesion. The absence of a narrator leaves the direction of the piece uncertain. The storytellers (and their stories) vary in effectiveness: the dedication of Marylee Orr to her cause is striking, but Father Robert Ryan's religious defense of local fishing seemed a little simplistic and out of place. Some might take issue with the entirely wholesome presentation of the fishing industry off the Louisiana coast, or critique the broader presentation of the region as exceptional and unrivalled (one commentator noting how the Everglades pales in comparison). The Deepwater Horizon segment utilizes some overfamiliar rhetoric by politicians, and ultimately the story amounts to a conventional and well-trodden message of corporate greed and government failure. Some might even question the need for another documentary-style piece of environmental alarmism.

However, Bowermaster's SoLa boasts a regional charm that lifts it above many other environmental movies. The film is masterfully shot and has a distinctive feel to it. Striking landscape images highlight the interplay between nature and civilization, rebirth and dereliction, and people and place. The overarching narrative of decay is neither forced nor overplayed. All the stories and storytellers have an authenticity to them. The documentary also manages to capture a region, as one storyteller relates, clearly “at risk.” Thus SoLa provides useful commentary for anyone interested in the contemporary South or US environmental issues.