Louisiana Story

Louisiana Story is a 1948 docudrama fiction movie. The score won a Pulitzer Prize for Music.

onscreen before the credits:

Louisiana Story being an account of certain adventures of a cajun (Acadian) boy who lives in the marshlands of Petit Anse Bayou in Louisiana.

FilmReference.com says, "The film is a poetic reflection of [director] Flaherty's youth, in which he explores his own life-long relationship to the wilderness and natural environment, and to the people who live there" and concludes that it "remains an enduring work of art for its sheer visual beauty". DVD Talk says, "If one can surrender to an evocation of the world as a child might see it and understand it – according to Frances, this was the Flaherty's intention – Louisiana Story works well enough."

Senses of Cinema says,

Often considered to be Robert Flaherty’s masterwork, Louisiana Story is the culmination of Flaherty’s poetic method, formally and thematically drawing together the promise that can be seen in Nanook of the North, Man of Aran and The Land, with a mediation between modernity and regionalism. While The Land marks a shift from the pre- modern nostalgia of the early film to an engagement with modernity, Louisiana Story directly addresses the issue of the environmental impact of mechanisation upon the pristine environment of the bayous of Louisiana in a film sponsored by Standard Oil albeit with the approval of the sponsor.

DVD Journal says,

Offensive corporate propaganda aside, Louisiana Story won the Venice Film Festival's International Prize that year for its "lyrical beauty." The 1952 Sight and Sound Critics' Poll dubbed it one of the Top Ten Films of All Time, and in 1994 the Library of Congress dubbed Louisiana Story "culturally significant" and ranked it among the first films selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.

This film is listed in the book 1,001 Movies You Must See Before You Die. TCM has information. Rotten Tomatoes has a critics score of 79%.