The Order of Myths (2008)
Folly River Films, Lucky Hat Entertainment, Netpoint Productions

Description

The first Mardi Gras in America was celebrated in Mobile, Alabama in 1703. In 2007, it is still racially segregated. Filmmaker Margaret Brown (Be Here to Love Me: A Film About Townes Van Zandt), herself a daughter of Mobile, escorts us into the parallel hearts of the city s two carnivals. With unprecedented access, she traces the exotic world of secret mystic societies and centuries-old traditions and pageantry; diamond-encrusted crowns, voluminous, hand-sewn gowns, surreal masks and enormous paper mache floats. Against this opulent backdrop, she uncovers a tangled web of historical violence and power dynamics, elusive forces that keep this hallowed tradition organized along enduring color lines.

Tags

Segregation, Mythology, Alabama

Collected reviews and ratings

10 Salon.com | Andrew O'Hehir

Across the breadth of Brown's compassionate portrait of Mobile's black and white Mardi Gras festivities in 2007 -- which coexist peaceably enough but rarely interact -- we come to see a city alternately puzzled, imprisoned and enraptured by its past, where people do things a certain way because they can't imagine anything else.
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10 Los Angeles Times | Robert Abele

"The Order of Myths" is an invaluable portrait of us-and-them America, a smart, generous, poignant, quietly disturbing movie about secrecy and hospitality, and how easy it is for a tradition of separateness to flourish when the stakes are as deceptively frivolous as an eye-popping yearly party.
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10 New York Times | Manohla Dargis

In contrast to the cloistered, all-white Mardi Gras membership group (called a mystic society) that gives the movie its poetic and freighted title, Ms. Brown has a beautiful grasp of gray.
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9.2 The Onion A.V. Club | Noel Murray

The Order Of Myths' central question remains tantalizingly unanswered: When a society respects its old-growth trees so much that they let the roots crack the sidewalks, are they being noble or ignorant?
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9.0 Amazon user reviews

Director Margaret Brown's expert use of irony and social commentary in "The Order of Myths" is as captivating as the elaborate and pricey galas of the 2007 occurrence.
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8.8 Austin Chronicle | Josh Rosenblatt

Brown is at her cinema-verité best when capturing the subtle, nearly imperceptible looks on the faces of people forced into social interactions with others they have no idea how to deal with, much less understand.
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8.0 PopMatters.com | Cynthia Fuchs

Traditions are surely hard to break, especially when they’re premised on forgetting bad history and supporting mythic self-images.
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8.0 DVD Talk | Chris Neilson

The Order of Myths is the most poignant documentary I've seen about race relations in America in a long time.
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7.0 Variety | John Anderson

"Order of Myths" looks good, and its characters are memorable. It's important to know that the "traditions" extolled by both sides of Mobile involve keeping people apart. But it's not clear at all that Brown is bringing them together.
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7.0 Slant Magazine | Andrew Schenker

Brown's subjects are always insisting on the importance of the past, of getting in touch with their "roots" , but this clearly means different things to different people, depending on which side of the racial divide they fall on.
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5.8 About.com | Jennifer Merin

It's disturbing that the film, while focusing on Mobile's Mardi Gras obsession, makes no reference whatsoever to the world's broader social and political issues. It's hard to tell whether this insularity is a failing of the community's or the filmmaker's.
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