Trouble the Water

Aug. 31, 2008

When the winds of Hurricane Katrina began to blow and dark clouds threw shadows over the hot streets of New Orleans, Kimberly Roberts grabbed a used $20 video camera that she bought the day before.
Roberts roamed the neighborhood, capturing the nervous looks of little girls and old men. The drizzle morphed into a torrential rain and Roberts was forced to take refuge in her ramshackle attic, along with her husband, Scott, and neighbors. She kept taping the raging floodwaters and awaited rescue that never came. Her most dramatic footage includes a do-gooder guy draped over a punching bag and ferrying her neighbors to higher land.
“It’s unbelievable. She somehow keeps the camera dry while all this is going on,” said filmmaker Tia Lessin.
After escaping the attic and seeking refuge at a Red Cross shelter, Roberts met Lessin and her filmmaker partner, Carl Deal. The result is Trouble the Water—a documentary that the media are gushing over (New York Times and Time magazine no less). It was awarded the Grand Jury Prize at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival as best documentary of the year.
Roberts, a rap artist, has been called the “heart and soul” of the film. Along with 15 minutes of her raw and disturbing footage shot at ground zero of Katrina, she wrote and performed songs for the documentary.
Lessin and Deal constructed a story with Roberts’ footage, along with their own, which they shot over two years. They sliced in news reports to provide context.
The film will be shown at the State Theatre in Traverse City beginning August 29, the third anniversary of Katrina, through Sept. 4. The film was among a handful of documentaries chosen to air at both the Democratic and Republican National conventions.
Lessin, who did a phone interview from Denver last week, is hoping that the political movers and shakers will take note of the movie’s unspoken message.
“It’s an emotional film and also very political. We want to hold the political officials, and especially the Bush Administration, accountable, and no one has held them accountable to date for any of these crimes—for the collapse of the levees that were structurally unsound, for the failure to evacuate the poorest of the city, and for their failure to provide rescue and relief efforts for days after the storm hit.”
In one scene displaced residents, including women and children, approach a vacant military base (the troops have left for Iraq) and beg to stay in the empty rooms. The guards order them away at gunpoint, and are later commended for their “bravery” for defending the base.
“It’s such a raw story about what an individual has to go through. When all the institutions failed them, what were they left with? Kimberly Roberts is a resourceful and resilient woman who had grown up in terrible, abject poverty and was all but abandoned by society. Yet she’s made her way through life and has learned how to be her own first responder. And that really came in handy when the levees broke.”
The film has only been released in New York City and Los Angeles so far, and will be rolled out throughout the country in September by Zeitgeist Films.
The movie fortuitously made its way to Traverse City, thanks to the filmmakers’ affiliation with Michael Moore. Lessin and Deal helped produced Fahrenheit 911 and Bowling for Columbine, and Lessin was a producer of The Awful Truth. Unlike the style of Moore’s movies, Lessin said that she and Deal decided to stay out of the film—they didn’t even do voice-overs.
“We let people come to their own conclusions about the incredible, monumental political and moral failures of the Bush administration. Three years after Katrina, I think it was a manmade disaster and completely preventable,” she said.
Despite those failures, Lessin said Katrina left her with a sense of gratitude for the American people.
“People opened up their homes all across the country, opened up their wallets, people took off time and drove trucks full of aid to the Gulf Coast, teachers sent school books. It was an incredible outpouring of support and compassion. Church groups did incredible work, and continue to do that. People cared and continue to care.”
So what’s New Orleans like now?
“They’re still struggling. I was just down there a week ago. Rebuilding efforts are all mostly private. The lower Ninth Ward has not been rebuilt. The federal monies have not been sufficient and those that have been allocated have not reached the ground. The rents have doubled – the homeless population has doubled. Only slightly more than half of the schools have opened. Hospitals are still unopened. The majority of the white residents have returned, while the majority of blacks have not.
“The 50,000 people in public housing have no place to live. There were undamaged housing units, which were simply demolished. I think the elites in the city wanted to be rid of the poor, so they took the opportunity to eliminate public housing. Tens of thousands of people are still stuck in Houston, Atlanta, and Baton Rouge.”
What about the argument that it was stupid to build neighborhoods in a swamp in the first place?
“It’s also true that the city of Amsterdam was built on landfill. Lower Manhattan was built on landfill. No one is suggesting that Wall Street disappear. Homes in California are built on mudslides, not to mention fault lines. Those communities always get rebuilt when disaster strikes. In the city of Los Angeles, there’s not enough drinking water, but we’ve created all kinds of systems so people can live there.
“We are spending $350 million a day on a war in Iraq. With that level of spending, we could repair the levees and they would hold. We could also eliminate poverty in the region. We have the resources to do that, there just needs to be the political will. I don’t think the answer is to displace the poorest of the city’s population.”