The 37th New Orleans Film Festival opens on the evening of Thursday, Oct. 22, at the Contemporary Arts Center's Black Box Theater with a film about a woman who has been singing in this city for more than six decades. "Victory," directed by Ben Chace, is a portrait of Irma Thomas, the Ponchatoula-born, New Orleans-made singer known everywhere here as the Soul Queen of New Orleans. The screening begins at 7:30 p.m.
It is a fitting opener for a festival that its organizers describe as a celebration of the legacy of New Orleans and its people. Over six days, Oct. 22 through 27, the festival will screen 175 films. Screenings run at the Contemporary Arts Center at 900 Camp St., which serves as the festival's central hub, along with the Prytania Theatre Uptown at 5339 Prytania St., The Broad Theater and additional satellite venues. A virtual cinema extends the festival online through Nov. 1, available globally.
That is the practical appeal of a festival like this one: many of the titles on the schedule will not reach theaters or streaming services for months.
But the opening night belongs to Thomas, and her story is the kind that rewards a documentary. Born Irma Lee in Ponchatoula in 1941, the daughter of a steel chipper and a maid, she grew up on gospel — Mahalia Jackson, Cecil Gant — and sang in a gospel quartet at Home Mission Baptist Church in New Orleans. She was discovered in 1959 while working as a waitress at a New Orleans club, where she was asked to sing alongside the R&B singer Tommy Ridgley. According to her account, the duet got her fired. It also got her a career.
Her first national hit, "(You Can Have My Husband, But Please) Don't Mess with My Man," reached the Billboard R&B chart in 1960, when she was 19. In the early 1960s she worked with producer Allen Toussaint on New Orleans R&B classics including "It's Raining." In 1964 she wrote and recorded "Wish Someone Would Care," her highest-charting pop hit, drawn from her life as a 17-year-old mother of three and written after a breakup with her then-husband. That same year she recorded "Time Is on My Side," which the Rolling Stones covered and made their first U.S. single.
Commercial success on the scale of her contemporaries Aretha Franklin and Etta James never came. What came instead, in 2007, was her first Grammy — Best Contemporary Blues Album, for "After the Rain," recorded in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, which had destroyed her New Orleans home. She was in her sixties, and the award arrived after more than five decades of work.
Chace is a filmmaker and musician who has spent years in this musical world. His 2022 documentary "Music Pictures: New Orleans" played Tribeca, Rotterdam, Vancouver, Ghent and the New Orleans Film Festival, and he has collaborated with Thomas, Ellis Marsalis, Little Freddie King and Jon Cleary. "Victory" grew out of that relationship.
The festival itself has deep local roots. The New Orleans Film Society was founded in 1989 and produces the festival annually; the festival is Oscar-qualifying, and from 2012 to 2015 MovieMaker Magazine named it one of the "25 Film Festivals Worth the Entry Fee." This year's edition is presented by Andscape, the ESPN-owned platform focused on Black culture and storytelling.