2008 Academy Award Nominee for Best Documentary Feature, this astonishingly powerful film is at once horrifying and exhilarating. Directed and produced by Tia Lessin and Carl Deal (producers, Fahrenheit 9/11 and Bowling for Columbine), Trouble the Water takes you inside Hurricane Katrina in a way never before seen on screen. The film opens the day before the storm makes landfall–just blocks away from the French Quarter but far from the New Orleans that most tourists knew. Kimberly Rivers Roberts, an aspiring rap artist, is turning her new video camera on herself and her 9th Ward neighbors trapped in the city. “It’s going to be a day to remember,” Kim declares. As the hurricane begins to rage and the floodwaters fill their world and the screen, Kim and her husband Scott continue to film their harrowing retreat to higher ground and the dramatic rescues of friends and neighbors. The filmmakers document the couple’s return to New Orleans, the devastation of their neighborhood and the appalling repeated failures of government. Weaving an insider’s view of Katrina with a mix of verite and in-your-face filmmaking, Trouble the Water is a redemptive tale of self-described street hustlers who become heroes–two unforgettable people who survive the storm and then seize a chance for a new beginning.
SPECIAL FEATURES
- 16:9 anamorphic presentation, enhanced for widescreen televisions
- Outtakes, including extended and deleted scenes
- Q&As from the 2008 New Orleans premiere and 2009 Roger Ebert Film Festival
- Trouble the Water at the 2008 Democratic National Convention
- U.S. theatrical trailer
- Optional English subtitles for the deaf and hearing impaired
- Optional Spanish subtitlesThere have been other good films documenting the Hurricane Katrina disaster, but producer-directors Tia Lessin and Carl Deal’s Trouble the Water tells the story from a point of view that’s unusual, if not unique: from the inside out. That perspective is provided by Scott and Kimberly Roberts, a young couple from New Orleans’ Ninth Ward who are the central figures in this harrowing but ultimately uplifting drama. On August 28, 2005, two days before Katrina came to town, Kimberly (also an aspiring rapper whose stage name is Black Kold Madina), started shooting footage with her own video camera. “I’m showing… that we did have a world before the storm came,” she says, and she keeps at it even as the hurricane forces her, Scott, and other family members to hole up in the attic as the rain, wind, and floodwaters take their toll (“We’re truly under siege,” Kimberly reports. “We’re barely living up here”). They eventually find temporary refuge elsewhere, but two weeks later, having lost a grandmother and an uncle in the storm, the couple returns to their neighborhood, now accompanied by professional filmmakers. The images here are striking–not just their horror at seeing what’s become of their home, but also their delight at finding a couple of their dogs still alive, or Kimberly’s joy and relief as she recovers a photo of her mother, who died of AIDS when Kim was 13. And while one can certainly sense their despair, helplessness, and resignation (the government’s appallingly slow and inept response does not go unnoticed), there’s very little anger–even when the officers at a nearby Naval base, where there’s plenty of room, turn them away–and a surprising amount of optimism. “I’m still here,” Kimberly says, “looking for a better tomorrow.” Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke remains the definitive and most comprehensive Katrina documentary, but for a more personal approach, Trouble the Water (which includes several of Roberts’ hardcore, profanity-laced raps on the soundtrack) is highly recommended. –Sam Graham
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May 5, 2010
#1
What film were these critics watching? What I saw was the beginning of a film
with video shot by someone who obviously didn’t know one end of the
camera from the other. Maybe it got better, but I gave up on it because of all
the dizzying amateur camera work.
May 5, 2010
#2
“Trouble the Water”
Mixed Feelings
Amos Lassen
I just finished watching Tia Lessin’s and Carl Deal’s documentary on Hurricane Katrina and I am just not sure how I feel about it. “Trouble the Water” (Zeitgeist Video) looks at the way Kimberly Rivers Roberts, an African American woman, and her family was affected by the storm and I found myself thinking that this is a very one-sided picture. Like Roberts, I was stranded in New Orleans and I suffered a great many problems but unlike Roberts, I am a Caucasian and quite frankly I am quite tired hearing how the Black community suffered. I, too, lived in the Ninth Ward and I, too, lost everything. Unlike Roberts, I do not rap nor do I pepper my speech with obscenity yet I every bit as amazing as she claims to be and I have managed to continue my career in academia here in Little Rock, Arkansas. I hardly think that the film represents the way New Orleans truly suffered after the storm and in no way is this film Academy Award material. It plays like it has never been edited and the hero comes across as a foul mouthed person who thinks a great deal of herself instead of the drug dealer she has been. Her brother who was incarcerated during Katrina gains heroic proportions and the fact that he had broken the law appears irrelevant.
Katrina affected everyone regardless of race but somehow this seems to be a forgotten issue with this film. The film does show the horrors of the hurricane but only for those directly involved. Roberts claims to show that there was a world in New Orleans before the storm and this is not something new. However the world we see is one where whether or not there is marijuana. This is not the New Orleans that I knew. The way English is spoken here is an embarrassment and this is not because education is not provided. I am a product of the New Orleans public schools and was a teacher in them as well. This is not the way New Orleanians are taught to speak.
In the notes on the DVD, Mike Scott, the film critic for the New Orleans paper “The Times Picayune” states that those that we see in the film “are the perfect subjects to tell the Katrina story because they are New Orleans”. They are not the New Orleans I know and we lived in the same neighborhood. I found the film to be an affront to many of us that suffered and a total misrepresentation of the good people of the Big Easy but then again I am sure I am in the minority.
May 5, 2010
#3
Perhaps it is unfair. One week before viewing this documentary, I’d read — with appreciation and wonder — Dave Egger’s magisterial non-fiction work, ZEITOUN. The resonance Dave Eggers has with his character and the many moral, ethical and spiritual issues the author invokes in his narrative of a Katrina survivor — far outweigh the significance of this film. I recognize I’m overlapping media, but there you have it.
Who could argue with the passion, decency and authenticity of Kimberly Rivers? The woman is a saint – as is her husband, as were many of her neighbors. That, sadly, does not a five-star documentary make.
The film’s greatest strength is its coverage of the hours before the storm made land, in which an ordinary community was transformed, moment-by-moment, into absolute hell. The hand-held, home-video photography works well, as do the many cut-in segments to network news and obtuse statements by George Bush, who is too stupid and culpable to even mention here.
Even so — and unlike Egger’s ZEITOUN, which exposes far more than the garden-variety racism which emerged after Katrina — this movie communicates very little new convictions or material which might grip or educate a viewer. That doesn’t mean the film is a flop. Far from it.
Unlike other Katrina films, it gives you an uncanny perspective into the ways the lives of one family were transformed by a natural disaster — but more by wholesale neglect — and some troubling racism too — in the shadow of the National Guard.
And then: The National Guard should not be stereotyped as a group of puppies on Michael Brown’s leash. Sensible rules tend to go south in the wake of any disaster of this magnitude.
That said, TROUBLE THE WATER will satisfy those who never saw Spike Lee’s marvelous WHEN THE LEVEES BROKE, although they should see the latter first. It is sad that TROUBLE THE WATER has been hyped to an offensive degree. So sorry, folks. In light of the critical acclaim it’s received and of the many fine accounts of the fatalities and obscenities which lay in Katrina’s wake, it is a bit of, well, a bore — though not for the brave families who experienced it and whose lives the film recounts.
May 5, 2010
#4
This documentary reminds me of how much hard core urban neighborhoods and the people in them remain just that – neighborhoods and people- despite the ardent and unremitting depictions of them by mainstream press (and other collaborators) as throw-away, and the people as “animals.” The film clarified who the true “animals” are, and thinking, rational individuals might want to question the mentality of the privileged in these-here American states. This film helped me to regain my trust in the inner strength of all people; we all yearn to be heroes, we all long to do the right thing. We just need context and opportunity.
May 5, 2010
#5
great and realistict i guess k. west said it best about bushs’ relationship w/black people