The Performers

In the French Quarter, four hustles collide over a single week — and everyone running one is also playing a part.

The Performers moves through New Orleans at street level, following four hustles that overlap without ever quite becoming one story. There are portraits drawn for tourists in Jackson Square, a shoe-shine crew working the corner, a con that travels out past the parish line — and underneath all of it, the same arrangement: someone performing, someone believing, and money changing hands in the gap between. Shot on location in the Quarter, Lafayette, and Chalmette in a documentary-influenced, observational style, the film stays close to the people doing the work. Nobody here is a mastermind. They're improvising, most of them badly, in a city that has always paid better for a good act than an honest one.