The film documentary, I’m Carolyn Parker: The Good, the Mad and the Beautiful will screen at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival. I’m Carolyn Parker, directed by Jonathan Demme (Silence of the Lambs, Beloved, Rachel Getting Married), depicts the inspiring personal journey of ex-civil rights activist Carolyn Parker, as she returns to her community’s flood devastation after hurricane Katrina and struggles to rebuild her New Orleans home.

Courtesy of the film’s website, the full storyline goes:

Carolyn Parker was the last to leave her neighborhood when a mandatory evacuation order was decreed as Hurricane Katrina approached New Orleans in the summer of 2005. After the floodwaters subsided, Mrs. Parker was the first resident to return to her now flood-devastated community with what many thought was the “impossible dream” of bringing her ruined home back to life.

I’m Carolyn Parker: The Good, the Mad, and the Beautiful unfolds as an inspiring portrait of an extraordinary woman. Mrs. Parker takes us deep inside her personal biography as a child born in the 40’s, raised in segregated New Orleans’ Lower 9th Ward, who became a teen-ager joining the front lines in the Civil Rights movement of the 60’s, who worked for thirty years as a cook-turned-chef in the hotel industry, and became one of the most outspoken voices in the fight for every New Orleanian’s right to return home after the devastation of the floods that followed Katrina. That Carolyn faced these odds with unbridled wit, spirituality and an abiding sense of social justice borne of her life in New Orleans makes for a unique cinematic tale of personal triumph.

I’m Carolyn Parker: The Good, the Mad, and the Beautiful is the portrait of an “ordinary family” who banded together under extraordinary circumstances, and reclaimed their home.

I will definitely keep this documentary on my radar, and perhaps you should too.

Watch the three clips below.