Toronto’s Open Door has again joined forces with Emmy Award-winning journalist Hanson Hosein, this time for the documentary Independent America: Rising from the Ruins, focusing on the plight of independent business owners in post-Katrina New Orleans.

The film is a follow-up to 2006’s Independent America: The Two Lane Search for Mom & Pop, in which Hosein put the spotlight on big-box retail wars in some American communities. The film aired on Japan’s NHK, Australia’s SBS, the Sundance Channel in the U.S., and here on Super Channel.

‘We had such a great response to the first film — we were part of this new movement to buy local — and felt it was important to update that message with a relevant story,’ Hosein tells Playback Daily.

Open Door executive producer Tom Powers (Cracked Not Broken) came on board and negotiated a presale for Ruins to Super Channel. Powers says he was keen to work with Hosein when they met through a mutual friend in 2005.

‘I’d been searching for a project that would have relevance to the tagline of our company, which is ‘content that matters.’ [The Independent America docs] are the kind of work we want to be associated with,’ Powers adds.

Ruins, budgeted at $400,000, was shot in HD over several weeks in May and June in New Orleans. It focuses on local business owners who returned to the city to try to save it, while many chain retailers such as Starbucks have yet to open their doors in parts of New Orleans. Hosein says the biggest challenge was to tell the story from a local perspective.

‘It was important to me that I didn’t parachute into the story as I did as a foreign correspondent, and generalize or make the wrong conclusions…I wanted [the people of New Orleans] to tell their own stories,’ says Hosein, who produces through his Seattle-based shingle HRH Media.

Hosein will begin post-production on Ruins at Open Door next month, to be completed Aug. 30, in time for the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. The doc will be part of a showcase during an event in New Orleans.

Ruins will also be shopped to Sundance and PBS.