Bio
Pat Mire is an award-winning documentary filmmaker born on a rice farm near Eunice, Louisiana and now based in Lafayette. Mire’s cultural documentaries have been broadcast nationally in the United States on PBS, the Discovery Channel, and TNN’s American Skyline. His documentaries have won awards in national and international competitions, including the Margaret Mead Film Festival and the American Anthropological Film Festival, at which he won the coveted “Award of Excellence.” Mire and his films have been the subject of numerous articles and reviews in major magazines, newspapers and journals. Carl Lindahl, film reviewer for the Journal of American Folklore, called Mire “an important artistic force at work in French Louisiana whose camera work and editing are excellent.” Lindahl’s review compared Mire to the legendary documentary filmmaker Les Blank. Lindahl has written that, “[t]he second -generation films reviewed here find Blank responding to a call for a more focused and academically-guided cultural exploration and mark the debut of Pat Mire, a filmmaker dedicated to intensive, holistic presentation of specific aspects of his cultural heritage.”
Recognized for his creative filmmaking skills, Pat Mire was the only Louisiana filmmaker to receive a 1991 regional fellowship from the Southeast Media Fellowship Program that included fourteen states. In December of 1993, the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities honored Mire with a Special Humanities Award for his film work in recognition of his major contribution to the humanities in Louisiana. He was also the recipient of a 1994 fellowship from the Louisiana Division of the Arts, which had not given a fellowship to a filmmaker in six years. In 1995, Mire was recognized as a “Louisiana Success Story” at the Governor’s Arts Awards. In 1997, the Acadiana Arts Council honored Mire with the “Distinguished Artist Award,” which is given to an artist whose work has achieved national recognition. In February of 2000, Mire was presented with an “Artist of the Year Award” in Washington D.C. by United States Senator Mary Landrieu.
Mire’s feature film debut, Dirty Rice, was an official entry at the 1998 London Film Festival, where it played to two sold-out auditoriums. Neil Norman, film critic for the London Evening Standard, reviewed the film and wrote, “[w]hile the Big Easy, No Mercy, and more recently, Eve’s Bayou have flirted with the Cajun world, this is the real deal, 100% proof. This is not to be missed.”
Mire directed Against the Tide: The Story of the Cajun People, which was a November 2000 PBS “Pick of the Week” and had a 49.3% market coverage.
Clay Fourrier, executive producer of Louisiana Public Broadcasting, has recognized that Mire’s work has led to a number of high-profile film projects with LPB that have been aired nationally on PBS and that have garnered “both LPB and Mr. Mire numerous awards, including nationally recognized Telly and NETA awards of excellence.” According to Mr. Fourrier, all of these films highlight “the good things about South Louisiana and the Cajun culture.” Fourrier adds that “in his films, Pat shows the contributions of real people, not Hollywood stereotypes, to our country. This is the underlying theme of all of his work.”
Pat Mire was born on June 23, 1953, and grew up in a farming community near Eunice, Louisiana. He is an English and French-speaking Cajun, busy at correcting stereotypes and misconceptions about his beloved Cajun culture by presenting an insider’s perspective.