By sheer coincidence, she and some of the subjects of her film were in Louisiana a week later for two screenings at the New Orleans Film Society, so they went on a sad pilgrimage to where the rubble still lay in the street. When the incomplete Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in New Orleans collapsed in October, killing three workers and injuring dozens more, it put a spotlight on the perilous conditions that are endemic to the construction industry: shortcuts, overwork, low pay – all issues that Austin filmmaker Chelsea Hernandez chronicled in her documentary Building the American Dream, which debuted at SXSW.
