After seeing Spike Lee’s Katrina documentary, When the Levees Broke, I figured I had (vicariously) experienced the hurricane and its aftermath in as tight a focus as I ever would. But Trouble the Water zooms in even closer, telling the story of Katrina through the experiences of one remarkable couple, Kimberly and Scott Roberts. Kimberly presciently started filming the day before the storm, and her shaky home videos from her house in the ninth ward — first from the ground floor, and then from the attic — form the core of the film. Cut throughout are short, well-chosen news clips tracking the story as the rest of the world saw it unfolding; professional footage of Kimberly and Scott dealing with the fallout from the storm, in the weeks and months following, rounds out the documentary.
What’s most amazing is the extent to which the experiences of one couple encompass all the ugly layers and complications of the Katrina story: at various points, they’re in the attic, they’re on the interstate, they’re at the FEMA offices in northern Louisiana. Kimberly has a brother trapped in an abandoned prison, and a grandmother in hospital. They meet New Orleanians who plan to return, and others who don’t. They have moments of despair and hope, of wanting to return (or not) themselves. Somehow, they hold the entire messy story within them. And while Trouble the Water is not quite so emotionally wrenching as When the Levees Broke, it does clearly demonstrate — perhaps better than any other work I’ve seen on Katrina — the ways in which Louisiana’s existing poverty, the extent to which some people are allowed to fall through the cracks, was exposed and exacerbated by the storm. Katrina didn’t create those problems, but she certainly did bring them home to roost.
by Eva Holland | Source: DVD
27 Feb 2009 11:25 PM | Submit Comment
