CANNES, France (AP) — A provocative documentary screened Tuesday at the Cannes Film Festival argues that the human and environmental devastation of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill has been covered up by authorities eager to return to business as usual.

“The Big Fix,” by husband-and-wife American directors Josh and Rebecca Tickell, features interviews with Louisiana fishing families whose livelihoods and health have been hit by the spill, then expands into a sweeping critique of American capitalism.

The title cuts two ways: the movie argues the U.S. political and economic system is rigged, and huge changes are required to correct it.

Josh Tickell, whose last film was another oil-related documentary, “Fuel,” said the current movie argues that “screwing in a light bulb or buying a hybrid car are not going to change the relationship between the government, the energy industry and the financial sector.”

“It’s like playing cards, and the house has the deck stacked against you,” Tickell told The Associated Press.

“The Big Fix” has high-profile support from Tim Robbins and Peter Fonda, executive producers on the movie. Fonda also appears in the film, which is sure to be strongly criticized by the energy industry.

The film disputes industry claims that the millions gallons of oil spilled after the April 22, 2010, explosion on the BP PLC-owned Deepwater Horizon rig have largely been cleaned up or dispersed.

It says a huge undersea slick is poisoning the ocean and that chemical dispersants used to break up the oil are harming the region’s residents, many of whom say they have developed blisters, rashes and respiratory problems.

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An overwhelming majority of likely voters across the country and across the political spectrum support congressional action to direct oil spill fines to the Gulf Coast, according to survey results released Monday.

More than 4 in 5  respondents nationwide said that the spill penalties should go to “restoration of the Mississippi River Delta and Gulf Coast” rather than to broader purposes, such as paying down the national debt.

Nearly 70 percent felt strongly about this, according to the survey, which was conducted jointly by two Washington, D.C.-area polling groups and released by environmental advocates.

Gulf Coast members of Congress remain at odds over how much money that each state should receive, and the rules for spending it. As a result, legislation to direct the penalties to the Gulf has made little progress.

Clean Water Act fine money is expected to total between $5.4 billion and $21.1 billion.

Casi Callaway, executive director of the environmental group Mobile Baykeeper, said that the widespread support for sending billions to Gulf states could ebb if lawmakers cannot come to terms and people’s memories of the spill begin to fade.

“That ball is rolling. We’re either with it or we’re under it,” Callaway said. “We need leadership today.”

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The Counselor: Foreign Land, Familiar Words

In the weeks after the oil spill, Tuan Nguyen visited 15 towns around the Gulf Coast to seek out Vietnamese fishermen whose lack of English made their sudden loss of livelihood even more daunting. By some estimates, as many as one-fourth to one-third of Louisiana’s 12,400 licensed commercial fishermen immigrated from Vietnam.

As deputy director of a nonprofit group in New Orleans serving their needs, Mr. Nguyen saw to it that as many as possible received emergency funds to buy food and pay utility bills and helped some get mental health counseling. Some were ashamed to accept handouts, he said.

The lines of dazed and worried fishermen outside his center, the Mary Queen of Vietnam Community Development Corporation, are long gone. But Mr. Nguyen, 31, said his staff was still working nonstop to put lives back together. “We still see the same familiar faces,” he said, referring to men who have yet to go back to work or have trouble getting by.

Still, hardly any of them have left New Orleans so far, he said. “This is home,” said Mr. Nguyen, whose own parents arrived from Vietnam before he was born. “Everybody knows everybody.”

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The Shrimper: A Year Spent Wrestling with Paperwork, Not Nets

It has been a year of sitting inside, of dry paperwork, a year in which accounting displaced fishing as the cornerstone of the gulf economy.  This is no sort of work for a man like Alton Verdin.

On his ideal day, which is pretty much every day in a normal shrimp season, Mr. Verdin, 56 years old and lean, wakes in the dark at home in Pointe-Aux-Chenes, La., and steers his trawler through the quiet backwaters of the marsh. When the brown shrimp season began last May, he had a couple of the best weeks in memory: long, hot, wonderful days of bulging nets.

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The Restaurant Owner: Oil Rolled in and Tables at Two Places Emptied Out

Al Sawyer would rather be frying oysters than wading through the avalanche of paperwork that followed the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

And at 67, he would like to retire soon. But that is not going to happen.

His retirement plans, along with one of the two seafood restaurants he ran near the Alabama coast, got wiped out in the months after the Deepwater Horizon explosion.

“It’s been the hardest year of my life,” he said.

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The Conservationist: Tracking Flow of Oil on His Own

Before the oil spill began 50 miles off the Gulf Coast, Paul Orr, who works in Louisiana with a conservation group called the Lower Mississippi Riverkeepers, focused mainly on issues like battling discharges from sewage treatment plants in Baton Rouge.

But once an explosion set the Deepwater Horizon spill in motion, he threw all his efforts into tracking the oil’s effects in the Mississippi Delta basin. Relying on a network of subscribers, he updated conservationists and the public twice daily in an e-mailed newsletter over the next few months.

Eventually, Mr. Orr and his colleagues concluded that they could not count on the government to present reliable information in a timely fashion. So though he was not trained as a scientist, he decided to start collecting core data himself.

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The Rig Worker: Opportunity Beckons Up North

Ronald Brown, an offshore oil rig worker from Magee, Miss., got the call from Diamond Offshore at the end of September. Along with other roustabouts and roughnecks who worked the company’s Ocean Monarch, one of 33 rigs idled by a moratorium imposed on deep-water drilling in the gulf after the BP oil spill, he was being laid off.

“I started making calls that same day,” Mr. Brown said.

It took two months, but he ultimately found rig work — 950 miles north, in the natural gas fields of Pennsylvania.

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The Well Capper: Stemming a Disaster Helps Bring in More Work

For Pat Campbell, life since the Deepwater Horizon disaster has gotten both busier and slower.

Busier because Mr. Campbell, an executive with Superior Energy Services and a veteran blowout specialist who helped with the “junk shot” and other efforts to cap the BP well, has more work, it seems, than ever.

In addition to handling the usual stream of well-control emergencies around the world, his company, based in Houston, has plenty of other projects, among them helping a consortium of oil companies be better prepared for any future Gulf of Mexico spills.

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The Regulator: Answering a Call, Slowly

The night the BP well blew, Michael R. Bromwich was in St. Croix in the United States Virgin Islands minding his own business, which in this case was monitoring compliance with a consent decree between the Department of Justice and the islands’ police force, which had a history of poor training and complaints about excessive use of force.

Mr. Bromwich, a lawyer in private practice in Washington and New York, is a former federal prosecutor, Justice Department inspector general and an experienced troubleshooter for agencies in crisis.

He paid scant attention to the rig explosion and the ensuing spill in the Gulf. Offshore oil drilling, he said, was “not really on my radar.”

Not until a White House lawyer called in early June to sound him out about taking charge of the disgracedMinerals Management Service, the Interior Departmentoffice responsible for regulating deepwater drilling, which was being replaced with a wholly new agency called the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement.

“I said, ‘Really? Me?’ ” Mr. Bromwich, 57, recalled. He stalled for days, hoping the offer would go away. “I woke up nauseous at the idea of it,” he said.

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BAYOU LA BATRE, Ala. — By October, Tim Nguyen found that his work in a Mississippi shipyard was no longer paying the bills. His hours had been cut back, part of the general ebb of work along the Gulf Coast after the terrible summer of BP.

Mr. Nguyen went to an office of the Gulf Coast Claims Facility, which was set up to administer BP’s $20 billion fund for coastal businesses and residents.

He was told he could not file a claim. A law firm he had never heard of had already filed one in his name.

“I never signed up with anybody,” he said.

In the six months since, Mr. Nguyen, 43, has been in limbo, suspended between the law firm and the claims facility. He has yet to receive a dime.

The 30,000 or so Vietnamese-Americans living along the Gulf Coast, many of whom have few resources outside of their boats and bare hands, know about life at the mercy of nature. But a year ago this week, they began learning a far more frustrating kind of vulnerability: put out of work by an energy giant, they turned for help to a claims system that many found to be opaque and unresponsive.

For people in Mr. Nguyen’s situation, and it is impossible to know how many others there are, the disorientation has been particularly deep, as they found themselves caught up in a legal process they did not even seek.

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The Gulf of Mexico is known for its bounty — blue crab, shrimp, grouper, tuna, oysters — but ever since oil tainted a portion of the Gulf’s fishing grounds, the seafood has been a tough sell.

Even though much of the oil that spilled from last April’s Deepwater Horizon rig explosion has been cleaned up, the future is still murky for people who make a living plying Gulf waters.

Mike Voisin is a seventh-generation Louisiana oysterman.

“Once it was capped, everybody brought out that proverbial sigh of relief, like ‘Whew, we’re through this thing.’ Well we weren’t, and we still aren’t,” Voisin says.

Voisin is president of Motivatit Seafoods, an oyster processing company in Houma, La. His workers are shucking oysters mostly from Texas these days.

The Biggest Challenge

Before the spill, Louisiana produced half of the oysters sold from the Gulf. Voisin’s business was down 60 percent after the spill, and it has been slow to recover. The state’s fisheries are projected to lose $74 million this year from the lingering impact of the oil spill.

“People are hesitant to buy Gulf shrimp or Gulf product coming out of this oil area,” says Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries Secretary Robert Barham.

Most oyster grounds are open again. But they’re not producing nearly what they did before, in part because of damage caused by flushing freshwater out of the Mississippi River to hold the oil at bay.

But Voisin says the main problem is that customers are afraid.

“The brand for the seafood community is the biggest challenge that we’re faced with,” he says.

A recent survey of restaurants around the country conducted by Greater New Orleans Inc. shows just how bad the perception is. The economic development group’s president, Michael Hecht, says twice as many people now ask about the origin of seafood.

“The implication of course is they’re asking about whether it’s from the Gulf or whether it’s Louisiana seafood,” Hecht says.

He says 50 percent of people surveyed nationally now have an unfavorable view of Louisiana seafood. That’s a huge swing from a 73 percent favorable view before the spill.

They plan to fight back with a national ad campaign paid for with BP money.

The state of Alabama is already doing that with a new Serve the Gulf campaign.

Seafood Testing

The federal government is also trying to get the word out.

“Test results have been unequivocal. Gulf seafood is safe to eat,” says Eric Schwaab, head of fisheries at NOAA.

At the agency’s lab in Pascagoula, Miss., sensory analysts spend their days bending over Pyrex dishes and smelling the fish inside for the slightest whiff of oil.

Then they’ll have a taste. Seafood samples are also chemically analyzed for hydrocarbons and the dispersant BP sprayed on the oil slick. NOAA’s Walt Dickhoff says they’ve analyzed more than 5,000 samples and all have passed at margins 100 to 1,000 times below levels of concern.

“This is the most tested seafood in history. I’m completely confident it’s safe, it’s not contaminated,” Dickhoff says.

But others aren’t so convinced.

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David Grunfeld / The Times-Picayune

If your idea of a good time involves consuming freshly shucked Louisiana oysters by the dozen, preferably with an elbow propped against a local raw bar, you’re no doubt happier today than you were in May or June of 2010.

Those were the dog-hard days of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, back when Louisiana oysters were so hard to come by that local oyster bars were shutting down and cutting back hours, oyster distributors were ceasing normal operations and traditional Louisiana seafood restaurants were turning to Oregon and Connecticut for their bivalves — or eliminating them from their menus entirely.

Nearly a year after the April 20 explosion aboard the BP oil rig that unleashed the spill, killing 11 people, the situation is much less dire, at least from the diner’s standpoint. (The story is more complicated for Louisiana oyster fishers and distributors, who are not out of the woods.) Raw bars are shucking all over town. Louisiana oysters have resumed their position as the norm — and when the oysters are not local, they almost certainly are comparable products from the coasts of Texas or Mississippi.

Granted, this news is not going to make all mouths water. Results of a recent study released by Greater New Orleans Inc. revealed that the spill still makes consumers uneasy about the safety of Gulf seafood. Of the 180 people who responded to a NOLA.com poll last week, 55 percent indicated they have yet to resume eating Gulf seafood of any kind since the disaster.

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The administrator of BP’s $20 billion oil spill fund says Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood could undermine the claims process by urging a court to intervene and by making allegations that border on defamation.

Hood called those statements, made Tuesday in a court filing in Louisiana, “surreal.” Hood said he just wants the fund’s administrator, Washington lawyer Kenneth Feinberg, to make the process more transparent so people will know if he’s looking out for best interest of oil spill victims or BP PLC.

The dispute heated up after Feinberg’s lawyers filed the 12-page motion Tuesday in federal court in Louisiana. It accuses Hood of making “unsupported and damaging assertions” about the claims process. Feinberg was responding to documents has filed that ask the court to audit the claims process.

Hood told The Associated Press on Wednesday that he believes Feinberg’s claims facility is intentionally delaying and denying legitimate claims to force people to take the so-called Quick Pay option.

Quick Pay gives individuals $5,000 and businesses $25,000. They are required to sign a waiver that they won’t sue and won’t seek more money from the claims facility. Feinberg says 110,000 people in Mississippi and other states have taken that option.

“At some point, I’m going to put his tail in a chair and make him raise his right hand in a deposition and get to the bottom of whether him and BP conspired to force people into the Quick Pay process,” Hood said.

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Rusty Costanza, The Times-Picayune

Birds returning to Louisiana’s fragile shoreline from South and Central America continue to run the risk of being exposed to oil from the BP Deepwater Horizon spill, bird experts with the National Audubon Society said Wednesday.

A year after the disastrous gusher fouled miles of shoreline, the conditions along Louisiana’s coast make it imperative that Congress move quickly to require that the majority of fines paid by BP and other responsible parties go to coastal restoration efforts, they said.

“Last year, we described BP as irresponsible and negligent,” said Audubon President David Yarnold. “Well, the same is true for Congress now. It’s been nearly a year and we’re still waiting for Congress to make sure that BP penalty funds are going to be used to clean up BP’s mess.”

BP and other companies that assisted in drilling BP’s Macondo well could be liable for between $5 billion and $21 billion in fines under the Clean Water Act.

But the National Audubon Society’s bigger concern is to the health of a variety of threatened and endangered migratory species that are stopping in Louisiana this spring, including brown pelicans, roseate spoonbills, royal terns and great and snowy egrets. Some are nesting, while others are stopping to rest before heading north to other nesting areas.

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