Reviewed by Alexis Madden
(August 2008) Director: Tia Lessin, Carl Deal
Starring: Kimberly Rivers Roberts, Scott Roberts
America, a land of opportunity and progression: glossy, polished, refined, civilized, cultivated. Or is it? What happens when a natural disaster unveils a dirty secret? "In the flood waters of Hurricane Katrina everything about the social, economic, and racial injustice of American society floated to the surface," writes Bettina Aptheker, professor at University of California Santa Cruz. "Nothing could be hidden from news cameras on the scene; no sanitized 'spin' could be given to the unfolding catastrophe." Suddenly, we, as a nation, were forced to face the skeletons in our closet.
When Katrina's storm surges breached the levees, water inundated New Orleans and revealed a subculture living in extreme poverty, crime ridden and barely literate. The lower 9th Ward had a poverty level of 36.4 percent. A quarter of the households had an annual income of less than $10,000, while half lived on less than $20,000. How easily this "third world" county within our own country had been overlooked in favor of the festive, tourist-rich French Quarter only blocks away. Trouble the Water (winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival) is the determined documentary from Tia Lesson and Carl Deal that acts as a light beacon to expose these long-neglected problems - which remain under-addressed three years later.
With a haunting first-person perspective, Kimberly Rivers Roberts (aspiring rapper Black Kold Madina) captures the images and observations of her 9th Ward streets and neighbors in the final pre-Katrina moments with her video camera. After the rain begins to fall and the wind picks up, Roberts divulges her own requiem of the storm. "This is on its way. It's me, reporting live, Kold Madina... here we go." Kimberly Roberts and her husband Scott continued to film the unforgettable moments as the water swallowed their streets and belongings and while friends and neighbors hid in their attic. "They put it on the news that we should get out, but you got those people that just couldn't leave, like me. Not because we ain't want to, but because we couldn't afford the luxury. I believe in Jesus. The Lord will send me through this one. Whenever the Lord allow it, I'll be able to tell the story. August 28, 2005, on a nice beautiful Sunday, I ain't go to church, but I pray to the Lord please protect me and my family. People gonna die out here, man. It's real, man. It's like the Lord is upset, angry with New Orleans. And I don't blame him." Then the battery goes dead and the screen goes black. Two weeks later, the couple, followed by filmmakers, returns to New Orleans to tell of their journey from despair to hope, while revealing the failures of our government, the chaotic animalistic actions of the people left behind, and the hollow gap that still divides race and class in this 21st Century. Roberts remarks on her determination to use the devastation to move forward: "I couldn't see it when I was on the inside, but I can see it now. It was a good thing in a way because it forced us out." |
