Trouble the Water

The day before Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, Kimberly Rivers Roberts, living in the Ninth Ward, picked up a video camera she had just acquired and started filming her neighbourhood. She recorded the neighbours who had no way of getting out of the city, the streets, her own house. Then the water came. What she shot with that camera became one of the very few first-hand records from inside the disaster. Tia Lessin and Carl Deal directed the film together. Kimberly's footage is combined with material shot afterwards: the delay in the military response, the fight for housing and compensation, and how a poor Black neighbourhood was wiped out. The telling is not looking for a rescuer; it leaves the story to the people who lived it. The film won the grand jury prize for documentary at Sundance in 2008 and was nominated for an Academy Award.