Featured at the Cannes '84 and Toronto '83 Film Festivals, Mississippi Blues is a unique look at William Faulkner country, by the French Tavernier working in collaboration with Georgia-born American director and editor Robert Parrish. (Parrish's Hollywood career spans child-acting in the '20s and '30s to Oscars for editing and documentary directing, as well as features including the excellent Cry Danger (1952).) With an all-pervasive warmth and an underlying humor directed largely at themselves as “benevolent intruders,” Parrish and Tavernier approach the Mississippi Delta through its townspeople and its music--Delta Blues and gospel. They explore their own knowledge of this world, as well, Tavernier's taken primarily from readings of Faulkner and Twain; and Parrish's, from gut familiarity. As Tavernier does in his fiction films, they skillfully link the “drama” here with questions on assorted social issues, such as the relationship of church to politics, and, most importantly, the relationship of music to the whole of life in the Mississippi Delta.