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New Orleans Native Documents Katrina in Trouble the Water
Two weeks after Katrina, Kim Rivers & Scott Roberts return to a deserted 9th Ward to recover precious belongings from their home, in a scene from Trouble the Water
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On the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina there is little doubt that TV will be dominated by images of the flooded byways of the Lower 9th Ward and nameless African Americans waving for help atop nearly submerged homes. But what was it really like for those who had to find their way out of a city that had, overnight, become a fetid swamp?
Carl Deal and Tia Lessin’s film Trouble the Water tells the story of Kimberly Rivers Roberts, her husband and their assorted friends and family as the couple are deluged, trapped, make their way out of the decimated city and finally return weeks later to destruction and, shockingly, the dead body of one relative. But rather than recounting this retrospectively in a sit-down interview, the film effectively uses home video that Ms. Roberts shot throughout the chaos, footage that illustrates with grueling clarity what it was like for so many people who couldn’t afford to leave, yet, through innovation and fortitude, endured nonetheless.
Trouble the Water is a harrowing and intimate documentation of an unmitigated American disaster.