Louisiana Story is a 1948 American black-and-white drama film directed and produced by Robert J. Flaherty. Its script was written by Frances H. Flaherty and Robert J. Flaherty. Although it has historically been represented as a documentary film, the events and characters depicted are fictional. There is not enough factual or educational material in the film to warrant classifying it as docufiction. The film was commissioned by the Standard Oil Company to promote its drilling ventures in the Louisiana bayous.
Theatrical release poster
Robert Joseph Flaherty, was an American filmmaker who directed and produced the first commercially successful feature-length documentary film, Nanook of the North (1922). The film made his reputation and nothing in his later life fully equaled its success, although he continued the development of this new genre of narrative documentary with Moana (1926), set in the South Seas, and Man of Aran (1934), filmed in Ireland's Aran Islands. Flaherty is considered the father of both the documentary and the ethnographic film.
Flaherty in 1922
R.J. Flaherty taking a movie, Port Harrison, QC, 1920-21
BBC publicity shot of The Last Voyage of Captain Grant BBC TV 1938
Nyla, who played the role of the wife of Nanook, and her child