Cajun Music Doc ROOTS OF FIRE coming to Streaming & DVD on May 7!

"Get ready to feel the blood rush into your perception of existence in the profound cajun music documentary Roots of Fire. The audience is in for a hurricane of fun – the music produces an unquenchable joy that is genuine and undeniable. Roots of Fire reminds me of Les Blank’s legendary documentaries...like Blank, the Lavois explore their subject with such passion it transcends the bounds of the specifics. The insights into life and existence are surprising and intense."
-Michael Talbot-Haynes, FILM THREAT

"The biggest delight is all that music – joyful, toe-tapping and irresistible."
-Cate Marquis, Alliance of Women Film Journalists

Filmmaker Biographies

Abby Berendt Lavoi (Director/Producer) is an award winning Director and Writer whose work has screened at over 30 film festivals, with TV credits that include MTV, TVLand/Nick@Nite and CurrentTV. She was recently Showrunner of the 12 episode streaming series, My Amazing Cheap Date: New Orleans. Her feature, Roots of Fire, won Documentary of Year from the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities. She is in development on its sequel, Roots of Fire 2, and is directing and editing its spinoff series Dry Bones. Her screenwriting work has been recognized at Austin Film Festival, CineStory, and Stowe Story Labs. In 2021, she won the Women in Film and Television’s ‘Resilient Woman’ Award. She won Best Editor at Mockfest for the film Rolled, and Best Film at the San Francisco 48 Hour Film Festival. Her series It’s a Rough Life was a finalist for the NYTVF History Channel Unscripted Development Pipeline. She is a founder and partner at Lavoi Creative, creating work for Pandora, Google, Netflix, Autodesk, Vox, COMPLEX, & many more.

Jeremey Lavoi (Director/Producer) is an award-winning Director, Writer, and Cinematographer. He directed the multi-winning feature documentary Roots of Fire, which earned the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Documentary of the Year Award for 2023. He was the Showrunner of My Amazing Cheap Date: New Orleans for Hearst/ Very Local. He was on the Emmy Award winning team at CurrentTV in 2007 where he directed dozens of short documentaries on various topics including Skating the Aftermath, about New Orleans skateboarders in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. He was a Producer/ Editor on the mockumentary film Rolled, which received accolades at Mockfest in 2011. He was Director of Photography on Jennifer Newsom’s documentary The Great American Lie. In 2012 his team won Best Film at the San Francisco 48 Hour Film Festival. His web series It’s a Rough Life was a finalist for the 2014 NYTVF History Unscripted Development Pipeline. His additional television credits include Bravo, History Channel, Science Channel, MTV2, CNBC, Discovery Health, and TechTV/ G4. At Lavoi Creative he has produced content for Google, Netflix, Pandora, Vox, Discovery, COMPLEX, and others.

Stephen Thorpe (Sound Producer) is a Bay-Area based audio engineer. He started his career doing live sound and recording concerts back in 2004. Music studio work introduced him to the world of video post-production and eventually he found himself traveling the country with video crews. In 2012 he founded Din Pan Alley, an audio services company and in 2015 started a sound design studio in uptown Oakland. He does field and post-production sound for networks including ABC, CNN, NATGEO and ESPN, records remotely for NPR and travels with reality-documentary shows.