MISSION

We are a festival with a mission.

Patois’ mission is to create accessible spaces at the intersection of art and social justice.
We were founded as a film festival in 2004 by artists and activists, and have grown to year around events and other projects.

We are dedicated to nurturing our city's human rights community,
supporting the work of local organizers and organizations involved in these struggles, and linking local issues to international issues.
Our goal is to raise awareness of these issues and provide a forum for artistic expression of these themes.

Patois collective

Abdul Aziz

Abdul Aziz is a freelance photojournalist, filmmaker, and serial entrepreneur. For nearly two decades, he has worked to document conflict, war, social issues and culture spanning the globe from the Middle East and Africa to the far reaches of the Himalayas. His photos have been published by opinion leading news agencies worldwide. Most recently his work has focused on the rise of white nationalism in the United States and the removal of Confederate monuments in cities at the center of the debate, such as New Orleans and Charlottesville. Linktree

Chloe dewberry

Chloe Dewberry is a multidisciplinary artist and producer who has made fighting for liberation through creative storytelling a part of her life’s work. She currently serves as a Senior Strategist and Creative Manager at Red Cypress, where, since 2019, she has collaborated with grassroots organizations to fight for radical change through the effective use of video, art, media relations, and development of creative communications strategies. She is a writer who is passionate about civic-minded artistic practice, and sees film as an accessible method to enter a world beyond where we currently exist, and shift our current reality for the better. For Chloe, combining art, film, culture, and social issues/impact is a passion and responsibility.

Jordan flaherty

Jordan Flaherty has produced fiction, documentary, and TV series, including producing episodes of Al Jazeera’s Emmy, Peabody and DuPont-award winning program Faultlines. He has also produced for Democracy Now; teleSUR, and several other outlets. He has worked as an editor and other production roles with a range of producers including Francis Ford Coppola, Michael Stipe, and Christine Vachon, including producing the award-winning independent feature film Chocolate Babies, recently added to the Criterion Collection, and the 2022 documentary Powerlands. You can see more of his work at jordanflaherty.org.

jazz franklin

jazz franklin's filmmaking praxis plays with power and possibility. Her video and projection work aim to disarm “standard” production processes, storytelling, & visual languages of film or video. She  is a part of a global network of artists, activists and organizers called Gallery of the Streets who work together to “transform public and private spaces into temporary sites of resistance...into phantastical subversive imaginaries.” Before moving to New Orleans, jazz worked for The University of Alabama’s Center For Public Television as a videographer and editor. During her time there, she received a regional emmy nomination for outstanding achievement in the category “editor of a non-news program” for the documentary Preserving Justice. jazz was also the co-director of PATOIS’ 2019 New Orleans International Human Rights Film Festival.

Shana m griffin

Shana M. griffin is a feminist activist, independent researcher, applied sociologist, artist, and geographer. Her practice is interdisciplinary and undisciplinary, working across the fields of sociology, geography, public art, and land-use planning and within movements challenging urban displacement, carcerality, reproductive control, and gender-based violence. She engages in research, organizing projects, and art practices that attend to the lived experiences of the black Diaspora—centering the particular experiences of black women most vulnerable to the violence of poverty, incarceration, polluted environments, reproductive legislation, economic exploitation, and housing discrimination. She’s the founder of PUNCTUATE, a feminist research, art, and activist initiative foregrounding the embodied aesthetics and practices of black feminist thought; and creator of DISPLACED, a multimedia and public history project that chronicles the institutionalization of spatial residential segregation through the violence of racial slavery and displacement in New Orleans.

Shana is also the co-producer of Sooner or Later, Somebody's Gonna Fight Back, a documentary and multimedia project on the Louisiana State Chapter of the Black Panther Party; collaborator with Gallery of the Streets, a global network of artists, activists, and scholars; and co-founder Jane Place Neighborhood Sustainability Initiative, the first community land trust in New Orleans.

emily faye ratner

Emily Faye Ratner is a media maker and lawyer based in New Orleans whose work focuses on state violence. She has organized with local groups to challenge law enforcement violence, incarceration, and occupation and imperialism, working with organizations including Safe Streets Strong Communities, the Orleans Parish Prison Reform Coalition, and New Orleans Palestine Solidarity (NOLAPS). She has also co-convened Patois: The New Orleans International Human Rights Film Festival, at times serving as Patois’ Festival Director and currently as a member of its organizing collective. Her criminal defense practice focuses on finding paths to freedom for people sentenced to life in prison, and her civil rights practice focuses on revealing the everyday violence implicit in American policing and incarceration. Emily is a proud member of the National Lawyers Guild, the Louisiana Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, and the Board of Directors of Junebug Productions.

Darlene Jones

Darlene Jones has spent much of her life studying and learning the art and rewards of diplomacy, mediation, and walking in other's shoes, instead of being short sided and judgmental. Her activism began at age 14, when she was part of the first class integrating Francis T. Nicholls High School (now Frederick A. Douglass High School). More recently, her love of film led her to become a film reviewer for the New Orleans Film Festival. With PATOIS, she is now combining these passions.    

ZAFERHAN YUMRU

Originally from Turkey, Zaf (they/he) is a film and arts marketing professional and filmmaker. Zaf worked for !f Istanbul Independent Film Festival for 8 years, programming mainly for the festival’s queer film slate whilst working as the marketing manager. Upon immigrating to the U.S. in 2017, Zaf joined the New Orleans Film Society as the director of marketing and communications where he worked until July 2022. They currently hold the same role at the International Documentary Association (IDA). See their filmography at zaferhan.com

Acknowledgment of the Indigenous Land & African Burial Grounds

The New Orleans International Human Rights Film Festival takes place on the lands of Indigenous peoples—a place referred to in Chahta (Choctaw) and Mobilian Jargon trading languages as Bvlvancha, meaning “Place where many languages are spoken” or “Place of many tongues.”

Situated at the confluence of waterways, wetlands, trading routes, and economic exchanges, this region was subjected to the violence of conquest, land thief, and racial slavery to make way for a carceral landscape and colonial enterprise called New Orleans—a city built by and on the bodies, flesh, and blood of enslaved Africans and their descendants.

We acknowledge the Indigenous nations that inhibit these lands, the African burial grounds upon which the City of New Orleans stands, and the ongoing forms of resistance, actions, and relations taken up by activists, scholars, artists, and cultural bearers to decolonize the land.

As a justice-centered collective accountable to the Black and Indigenous communities that make our work possible, PATOIS stands in solidarity with Indigenous peoples locally and globally, Black liberation struggles throughout the Diaspora, and with anti-imperialist and anti-fascist resistance movements, recognizing that the decolonization of Indigenous land—be it in New Orleans, Palestine, Sudan, Congo, Brazil, or on colonial borders—is central to all movements for liberation.

- Shana M. griffin