As soon as Covington filmmaker and photographer Andrew Boyd met Joe Judice, he knew there was a story worth telling about the retired sugar cane farmer and his family.

It is a family that has farmed sugar cane in St. Martin Parish for seven generations, beginning in 1800.

“You spend a career meeting and filming and photographing people, and you know a good story when you see one. This looked like a great story,” said Boyd, a former Times-Picayune photographer who now runs his own photography and videography company, G. Andrew Boyd LLC.

Boyd has told that story in “Sugar in Their Blood,” a self-funded documentary.

Through interviews with both the Judice family and sugar cane experts, the hourlong film reflects both on the family’s farming history and the current challenges they — and the Louisiana sugar cane industry as a whole — consistently face to stay in business. It’s a story of pride and resilience in the face of constantly changing conditions, both in terms of business and climate, according to its promotional materials.

“One of the questions that gets asked early in the film and doesn’t get answered until the end is what the future holds. Will there be an eighth generation? And what the challenges are to farm sugar cane these days,” Boyd said.

“Sugar in Their Blood” debuted to a sold-out crowd earlier this year at the 18th Annual Cinema on the Bayou, a juried film festival in Lafayette, where it won the Best Louisiana Film award.

“It was so gratifying because my farmers were all at the opening, and I felt like I had done them justice, to have it seen and accepted and awarded that way,” Boyd said.

Northshore audiences will get a chance to see the film during two screenings May 6 and 7 at The Southern Hotel in Covington. Proceeds from the ticket sales will benefit the St. Tammany Art Association.

Boyd had not set out to create a film about sugar cane farming. But that changed after talking with his friend Chris Dautreuil about filming a sugar cane farm for another documentary filmmaker.

“Chris immediately said, ‘I’ve got a guy you need to meet’,” Boyd recounted.

Dautreuil, now a Covington resident, played high school baseball with Judice and connected the farmer and the filmmaker.

Judice and his brother, Robert, started Judice Brothers Farms, located in the country between Loreauville and New Iberia, in 1964. When Robert retired in 1993, his son Robert Jr., joined the operation. When Judice retired in 2011, his sons, Jim and Justin, joined Robert Jr. in running the farm, which totals more than 2,600 acres.

After their initial meeting, Judice gave Boyd permission to come back and film the farm’s operations.

“I went home, and I did a bunch of Google research and realized there really wasn’t a good story that showed what (modern-day) sugar cane farming is all about ….It was not something that had really been covered in the way this would allow me to cover it,” Boyd said. “From day one, this was a real passion project for me.”

Boyd’s passion for photography began as a young adult “through an interest in the outdoors,” he said, describing how on a hiking trip with a friend, he shot images with a point-and-shoot camera.

When they didn’t turn out how he hoped, the Jackson, Miss., native decided to invest in better camera equipment. He took journalism classes at Loyola University while attending Tulane University, which at the time did not have a journalism program.

Boyd joined the photography team at the newspaper in 1977 and began shooting videos along with still photography for the paper’s website, www.nola.com, around the time Hurricane Gustav hit Louisiana in 2008.

“I was just entranced with what you could do once sound became part of your toolbox and actual moving pictures became part of your toolbox. That all just fascinated me and seemed like a powerful new way to tell stories,” said Boyd, who left the Times-Picayune in 2018 to start his company that creates still photography and videos for clients.

To create “Sugar in Their Blood,” he spent from January 2019 to January 2020 filming a complete farming cycle. He visited the farm at least once a month, documenting the “downtime” in January and February when equipment is repaired, the planting of sugar cane and soybeans (the farm’s bumper crop) in spring, and the harvest in the late fall and early winter when the sugar cane stalks are cut. The film also shows the cane being processed in the local sugar mill.

Along the way, Boyd interviewed Judice, known as the family’s patriarch, and the younger generations about the family’s history and its future. He rode in tractor cabs during the cutting of the sugar cane and used drones (he is an FAA-licensed drone pilot) to film both the fields and the sugar mill.

“You got an up-close look at what’s involved, and these are great guys, too,” Boyd said.