Wide Blossoms (2016)

Full Overview

Wide Blossoms takes place one evening at a Baton Rouge bar, shortly after Hurricane Katrina. James, a young lawyer drinking perhaps to numb a guilty conscience, is from a biracial family but passes for white. He is about to leave when a mysterious young African American woman appears, disheveled and disoriented. She drops phrases and poems that haunt him. James, why didn’t you bring the boat? Mari asks. He insists that he doesn’t know her. But Mari persists. The storm left her with nothing but the poems of her grandpa who drowned in the flooding waters. As the bar nears closing time, James learns that the grandfather he never knew perished in the storm, because he did nothing to rescue him. Mari forces him to come out of denial, face the past, and take a first step at looking after someone other than himself. This night, James gets a second chance at redemption.