Austin dweller Margaret Brown brings her new documentary, The Order of Myths, to SXSW after a successful showing at Sundance. Brown’s last documentary was Be Here To Love Me, about the life of Townes Van Zandt—that movie was deservedly well received in Austin. Brown was born in Mobile, Alabama, where Myths takes place. The film follows Mobile-ites through one cycle of their Mardi Gras celebrations—a festival which the city is proud to have begun celebrating before New Orleans. Unlike the Big Easy’s do, however, the Mobile Mardi Gras is, effectively, segregated. There’s a white queen, and a white king, and a white parade, and white events. There’s also a black queen, a black king, a black parade, and black events. Brown introduces this troubling separation through a series of deft and compassionate interviews with major players on both sides, also including occasional diversions on the town’s history. The result is a heart-wrenching movie that gets very close to the heart of complex race relations in a Southern city.

Near the end, you get a quiet revelation: Brown’s mother was a (white) Mardi Gras queen herself. We recently had a chance to chat with her about the film.

Did you debate over how personal the film should be?

I knew that it was a personal film, and I love personal documentaries like Ross McElwee’s Sherman’s March, but I’m not that entertaining, and it wasn’t exactly that kind of film. I wanted to make a personal film, but not in the format of what’s considered a personal film. But my connection is how I got the access I got. Mardi Gras is an old, old tradition, and it’s very closed. So I wanted to explain what my tie was, and reveal that in an appropriate way. I felt like starting with it would really influence the way that you saw the film. I don’t want it to seem sneaky or dishonest, I just wanted to reveal it in a way that wouldn’t influence the facts that were presented.

That’s interesting, because I had it in mind to ask you how you got access to the people you got access to, and then at the point in the film when you revealed your family involvement, I was like, Ah-ha! Did you know before you started to make the movie how deeply it was going to go into the race relations question, or what the “story” would be?

The film was definitely a learning process for me. I didn’t go into it thinking I wanted to reveal this thing. I hadn’t lived in Mobile since I was seventeen. I thought I would make a narrative about my mother who was the queen in 1966—a reluctant queen. Then I started finding out all this other stuff, and I thought it was a much better story, and it needed to be documented. There was also a lot of stuff that didn’t make it into the film. There’s a gay Mardi Gras that MTV tried to make a movie about—we had 50 hours of footage on that, but it didn’t fit in. They don’t parade in public—it’s all private—and certain people didn’t want me to reveal their identities. I didn’t think I could clear all this with all of the people on film before Sundance. Did I want people to lose their jobs because of my film? I take that really seriously.

Have you shown the movie to the people who were in it?

Oh yes. One of my investors flew Stefannie [the black queen] and Joseph [the black king] and Helen Meaher [the white queen] and Brittain Youngblood [a white member of the court] and Dora Finley [a black community activist interviewed in the film] to Sundance and put them up, and so they all did the Q&As with me. I wish SXSW could have that experience. If you look at Indiewire.com, AJ Schnack wrote about one of the Q&As. Basically, the first one was pretty polite, people were laughing and they were just excited, and the second screening I have a friend who I went to grad school with, Michelange Quay, who’s a Haitian filmmaker. You know the part in the film when Brittain is talking about how she’s liberal, and she’s talking to that black woman in the kitchen? My friend raised his hand and said “I want to say something but I don’t want to offend anybody.” Everyone said, “Go ahead.” And he basically said to Brittain “It’s a power dynamic with you and this woman, and it’s not pure love like you think it is,” and she starts sobbing on stage and saying “I do love her,” and then Joseph who’s the black king came forward and put his arm around her and said “You can’t judge her for how she’s raised…” It’s interesting to watch the participants develop as friends, and then how their ideas develop, and how they presented what they thought. It was very moving. They didn’t know what the film was going to be like, I didn’t finish it until the day before Sundance, and then I showed it to them there. I was nervous about it because these people had entrusted their lives to me. I wanted them to like it.

What did Helen, the white queen, think about the movie? You put information about her family’s history as slave-owners in there that could be hard to deal with.

She’s a very sweet girl. She was very excited about coming to Sundance and she didn’t’ want to say anything that would hurt my feelings after seeing the movie. I think she was really taken aback by it, but I think she really liked the film. In general, people were more likely to comment on how they appeared physically, like “That dress looks terrible!” So Helen was like “I think my voice sounds really funny" and I was like “what are you talking about?” Some of that history, she didn’t know about her family. It was process of education for them too.

It’s really interesting, because all of the people who participate in the Mardi Gras in the movie said that “history” is one of the reasons why they are interested in the celebration, yet they're not aware of this racial history...

It’s a very selective idea of what history and tradition are. Helen did say in the last Q&A, without looking at me, “Some of it is really hard for me to watch.” I think it’s hard to be associated with a family history like that, and it’s hard to connect the past to the present day. It’s really hard to think about how some of that past is in the present. I don’t know if she’s thinking about what her obligation should be, now. I don’t think that these are things that come up. I’m hoping that now they will, not just with Helen particularly but with the rest. It’s not just a mirror of Mobile, AL, but of the whole country.

Did you worry at all that the movie might make Mobile look backward in comparison to the rest of the country?

I think people bring to it their own prejudices and ideas. I was interviewing Brittain’s friends at Brown University, about her being a debutante. It came up with one of her New York friends that there was a white and a black Mardi Gras. I said that to her, and then ten seconds later she said, “There’s a second Mardi Gras?” She said, “It’s segregated, is that legal?” She was incredulous. Then there was another tonal change. She said “Well, I’m from New York, and there’s nothing like that there.” I feel like people don’t examine themselves. The film is an examination about how people act, more than it is a talking head documentary. You can see stuff like what happens in the movie everywhere. Race is a big issue in America.

I really liked the subtle moments you had where the guests at the white parties would interact with the black servers—and all the servers were black. That’s something you see all over the country.

I would really, really hope that people wouldn’t look at the film and say “Not in my community” and not examine their interpersonal relationships with people of other racial makeups.

Okay, I had one more question. Did you see Brittain as sort of a stand-in for yourself?

Sort of. I went to Brown, she went to Brown…I was never a debutante…

Did your family want you to be?

My mom didn’t, but my grandpa, who I interview in the movie, really did. Brittain seemed like someone a bit like me, and also sort of like the kind of people I might imagine who would go see this movie, so that looking at her, an art house audience might be able to imagine themselves in her place. She is someone who had had the same education and same opportunities that I did. I wanted to see how being involved with Mardi Gras and the debutante process would affect her. I do know that when she saw the film it revamped what she thought.

Another thing that made me want to make this film, was that when I was talking about it with my family, my uncle said it would be interesting to him because he didn’t know what the black Mardi Gras is like! They’ll see a whole side of the city that they didn’t know about, and vice versa—I just showed this film at a festival in Missouri and a black professor from Mobile came to see it, and said he didn’t know anything about the white Mardi Gras until he saw the movie. We’ll show it in Mobile—it won’t be entirely comfortable, especially for me—I do think it’ll be welcomed there. I think a lot of people aren’t going to be happy. But not everyone there is backward. Not everything in Mobile is segregated. A lot of people want the city to catch up and have a more important place in the country. And again, this isn’t just a movie about Mobile—it’s a movie about the whole United States.

The Order of Myths will have its Austin premiere on Saturday March 8th at the Paramount Theatre as part of the SXSW Film Festival. For more info, check out the Film Threat / B-Side SXSW Guide.