"Everything about New Orleans and Louisiana, and Salt Lake City and Utah in general, is polar opposites," said LeMay, a Chicago filmmaker who explores that divide in the documentary "Desert Bayou." "This was like a fish-out-of-water story."

The movie, which LeMay is still editing, gives praise to Utahns who volunteered to help the Katrina evacuees in September 2005 - but also serves up harsh criticism of Utah officials for decisions LeMay believes were racially insensitive.

"It appeared [the evacuees] were criminalized from the get-go," LeMay said recently from his Chicago office. "If a group of white Norwegian fishermen washed up on the shores of the Great Salt Lake, would it have been different? Well, in my interviews, I found out that people [on the street] really did feel like it would be different."

Not true, said Michael Mower, spokesman for Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. "It was always the goal to be welcoming," he said Tuesday. "We were one of the first states to call and say, 'What can we do to help?' "

The Rev. France Davis, one of the main organizers of the volunteer effort to help the Katrina evacuees, agreed. "I don't think [the decisions], from where I sit, were intentionally any kind of racist thing," said Davis, pastor of Salt Lake City's Calvary Baptist Church.

In the film, premiering in New York in August, LeMay criticizes Utah officials for housing the Katrina evacuees at Camp Williams, the Utah National Guard base in the southern Salt Lake Valley.

Though he praised the mobilization efforts of Col. Scot Olson, Camp Williams' commander, who "did an incredible job, and his team did perform their mission perfectly," LeMay questioned the decision to house disaster victims at a military base and to enforce an 11 p.m. curfew.

"Why not say, 'These people have been through hell - let's not stockpile them.' . . . Make them comfortable, don't put them on a cot," LeMay said. "It reminds them of where they just came from, which is generations of black men in prison for maybe something as small as possession of stolen property. . . . And then you put them in a situation that looks a hell of a lot like that."

David Richard, one of the New Orleans residents who has made Salt Lake City their permanent home, was with his wife, Mary, in Camp Williams for two weeks. "I think we came out really good - they treated us real well at Camp Williams," Richard said. "We had doctors, we had Medicare, Medicaid, FEMA, the Red Cross. Everything was right there, you didn't have to run all over. Everything was set up well. It was excellent."

"The reason we went with Camp Williams," Mower said, "is that it was ready. It's a great facility - it's where we house our guardsmen. What we had at Camp Williams, in one location we could provide medical, meals, schools and housing in good facilities."

Verdi White, the retired director of the state's Division of Homeland Security, who coordinated the state's Katrina response, denied any bias. "Race or any of those kinds of factors were absolutely given no consideration at all," White said Tuesday from a business trip in Alaska. "You had very good people working on this thing."

LeMay also criticizes the state's decision to perform criminal background checks on 555 of the nearly 600 Katrina evacuees.

In the film, LeMay features one interview with Huntsman, who claimed the background checks were a common procedure mandated by American Red Cross policy - though Red Cross officials say it has no such policy for the people it aids.

But LeMay's harshest criticism is reserved for Mark Shurtleff. Utah's attorney general raised a firestorm soon after the evacuees' arrival in 2005, when he claimed in a radio interview that "several dozen" of the evacuees were "convicted murderers."

"This is the working poor that came to your state, not criminals," LeMay said.

Shurtleff claimed then, and now, that he received faulty information from the Department of Public Safety - and that he corrected the record within hours of that radio interview.

"I just misspoke," Shurtleff said Monday. "My comments were not meant at casting aspersions on a population or a race or any other nonsense."

Shurtleff said LeMay should get his facts straight, too.

In an early cut of the film, a narrator claims that "background checks turned up two outstanding warrants on misdemeanors, and just one person on federal parole." But, according to Sgt. Jeff Nigbur, a Department of Public Safety spokesman, the two outstanding warrants were for "significant" crimes - including one man who was arrested and sent to Florida on a homicide charge. Nigbur said that of the 555 background checks performed, 42 checks turned up "significant" criminal records back in Louisiana, for crimes Shurtleff said included homicide, aggravated assault, robbery and rape.

Shurtleff and Mower both maintain the background checks were necessary for public safety. "When they started talking about people opening up their homes to individuals, I said people need to ask the question," Shurtleff said.

LeMay said his film - which he hopes to screen in Salt Lake City in August, around Katrina's second anniversary - is meant not only as a political comment, but a profile of people adjusting to new lives in an unfamiliar place.

"There was no frame of reference for a 10,000-foot mountain, or the sea of white people that they saw," LeMay said, "because everybody in their [old] neighborhood was black."

LeMay said more than 100 of the Katrina evacuees have stayed in Utah, though the Rev. Davis puts the number above 200. "For a majority of those, it's been great," Davis said. "A majority of them who are working age have jobs and they are essentially self-sustaining, contributing citizens to the community."

As for reactions from Utah's predominantly white population, LeMay said the evacuees he met take it in stride. "They said, 'We get funny looks in the stores. . . . But we're from the South - you can't compete with that level of racism,' " LeMay said.

Richard recalled that when he learned where the plane would land, "I didn't know what to expect. My wife said 'Utah?' And I said the same thing. We've never been this far west before," Richard said from his home, an apartment in the Gateway complex. "But we haven't felt discrimination here."

spmeans@sltrib.com