New Orleans native Jon Batiste is lending his voice to a cinematic journey through one of North America’s most remarkable—and often overlooked—natural regions. The acclaimed musician narrates and serves as an executive producer of American Amazon, a new giant-screen documentary exploring the wetlands, forests, rivers and wildlife of the American Southeast, according to this article from Nola.com.

The film will begin showing in select IMAX and giant-screen theaters and museums on November 13, 2026, with MacGillivray Freeman Films handling distribution. Produced by Grizzly Creek Films in association with PBS’s Natureseries, the 40-minute documentary travels through Louisiana, Alabama, Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas. A two-part version is also scheduled to air on PBS in early 2027.

Louisiana provides a fitting introduction to the journey. American Amazon opens on Lake Maurepas, where a pirogue glides across the water as Batiste plays his melodica. From there, the documentary begins revealing an interconnected Southern wilderness of swamps, flooded forests, blackwater rivers, springs and ancient trees. The Louisiana setting also creates a natural connection for Batiste, whose New Orleans-area roots have long influenced his music and creative work.

Writer and director Eric Bendick said the idea for the project developed while his team was making Path of the Panther in Florida. As the filmmakers studied the natural history of the Southeast, they began recognizing just how unusual the region was. Photographer and producer Mac Stone, a National Geographic Explorer, also helped the team uncover landscapes and wildlife stories that eventually became central to the documentary.

Those discoveries stretch far beyond the familiar images of Southern swamps. American Amazon showcases ancient cypress forests and creatures that can be remarkably difficult to spot. Among them is the eastern hellbender, a large aquatic salamander that spends much of its life concealed beneath rocks in cool streams. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service notes that hellbenders are North America’s largest salamanders and can reach about two feet in length.

Other sequences capture natural events that appear only during narrow windows of the year. Synchronous fireflies, for example, coordinate their flashes during their mating season, creating striking nighttime displays. The phenomenon is so unusual that places including Great Smoky Mountains National Park carefully manage annual viewing opportunities to protect the insects and their habitat. Filming moments like these required the production team to plan around seasons, weather and the unpredictable behavior of wildlife.

Specialized technology helped reveal even more. Remote camera traps allowed the filmmakers to document wildlife with less human presence nearby, producing scenes ranging from swallow-tailed kites high in cypress trees to unexpected interactions among wetland animals. In Louisiana, wooded wetlands provide habitat for an extraordinary variety of wildlife; the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Atchafalaya National Wildlife Refuge alone supports more than 200 species of resident and migratory birds.

While American Amazon acknowledges threats such as habitat loss and development, its central approach is to first introduce audiences to the beauty and biodiversity of the region. Bendick has explained that the filmmakers hope familiarity can encourage people to better understand the landscapes around them before considering the larger challenges involved in protecting interconnected ecosystems and wildlife corridors.

For Louisiana viewers, that may be one of the documentary’s most compelling ideas. The swamps, cypress forests and waterways that can seem familiar are part of an ecological region filled with natural events that remain largely unseen. By putting those landscapes on an IMAX-sized screen, American Amazon invites audiences to look more closely at a wilderness that has been here all along.

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