One devastating home movieTrouble the Water
Zeitgeist Films
Kim Rivers Roberts and Scott Roberts outside their flood-damaged home in New Orleans in "Trouble the Water."
HBO will premiere "Trouble the Water" on Thursday, April 23 at 8:30 p.m.
UPDATE: Correction below. "Trouble the Water" is a documentary made by Tia Lessin and Carl Deal, a pair of professional filmmakers who worked with Michael Moore on "Fahrenheit 9/11," and like other documentaries it's a movie about real people and their lives, designed to enlighten and entertain in roughly equal measure. You could say that all documentary films represent a collaboration between director and subject, but in "Trouble the Water" that collaboration is stretched nearly to the breaking point, since the heart of the film is footage Lessin and Deal didn't shoot.
As they would be the first to admit,
"Trouble the Water" only exists because Kimberly Rivers Roberts, a charismatic, trash-talking "street hustler" (her words) and aspiring rapper from the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans, turned on her new Sony camcorder -- she'd bought it on the street for $20, provenance unknown -- on Aug. 29, 2005, and began to shoot what was happening in her neighborhood. What was happening, in case you've forgotten, was that a big hurricane passed over New Orleans, the city's levees were breached in many places, and the water on Roberts' street rose past the stop signs and nearly to the housetops.
If possible, Roberts' movie-within-a-movie is even more amazing than it sounds. She captures a tale of courage, heroism and tragedy more thrilling than any Hollywood spectacle; one neighbor, a man Roberts and her husband, Scott, hadn't even liked before the hurricane, risks his life to save them, swimming back and forth across the street using a punching bag as a flotation device. Roberts barely knew how to turn the camera on when the storm started, and her footage is highly uneven. But you can feel her taking ownership of the situation as the catastrophe worsens, doing her own TV-news-style voice- over and alternating between establishing shots and close-ups.What Lessin and Deal provide is a considered structure that places Roberts' footage within a larger social and emotional context as part of a self-defined life, in which Hurricane Katrina was both tragedy and opportunity. As Roberts makes clear, she's a former drug dealer who lived by her wits in one of the poorest, blackest neighborhoods in the United States. But no person can be reduced to her pathologies, and she's also a married woman with a tremendously likable and loving husband and a supportive extended family, some of them much more affluent. All those resources helped her in her remarkable odyssey out of the flooded Ninth Ward to a Red Cross shelter, where she approached the two white filmmakers from New York (who had been turned away by the National Guard) with the words, "This needs to be worldwide. Ain't nobody got what I got."
more...
http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/btm/feature/2008/08/21/trouble_the_water/
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