Day 17: 12 Years A Slave, New Orleans

For today’s calendar we’re sharing one of the more heartbreaking travel memories from the filming location for 12 Years A Slave, Felicity Plantation in New Orleans, LA. It’s a sister plantation to the St. Joseph Plantation that is actually open for public, but we got a special permission to shoot our 12 Years A Slave sceneframes on the Felicity grounds.

Michael Fassbender and Chiwetel Ejiofor in 12 Years A Slave, filmed partly in New Orleans.

The movie alone is a heartbreaking one, but once you see the original slave cabins standing on the plantation still in moderately good condition (which is a horrifying in-your-face reminder of just how recent this dark time in history was), it breaks your heart all over again.

The tour of the main house is a display of the owning family’s history and fortune more than it is about the actual history of slaving. Some between-the-lines remarks and the general dismissal of the fact that it was actually slaves that kept the plantation running really upset us. The old attitudes sit tight, possibly even tighter here in Louisiana.

So, not the happiest of travel memories, but certainly one of the most important and haunting ones. If nothing else, at least it serves as a reminder to be thankful of the much better times we live in now… but also about the fact that we still have a lot of work to do.

Our advent calendar will feature movie & TV sceneframes and short stories from filming locations we’ve visited during our Fangirl Quest years. You can follow the calendar by checking back in the Advent Calendar tag and check out all the movie locations in this handy map, updated as we go!