Louisiana has proved it is no longer just part of “flyover country.”
The Sundance Film Festival awarded its Grand Jury Prize for documentary, the top award for an independent film, to “Trouble the Water,” a film following the lives of two Hurricane Katrina victims.
Carl Deal and Tia Lessin, the directors and producers of the documentary, said they traveled to Louisiana about two weeks after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans to film the aftermath of the storm.
“We wanted to make sense of what we saw on television,” Lessin said. “We felt such outrage and shame.”
Deal and Lessin originally set out to film New Orleans soldiers returning from Baghdad, but the National Guard’s public affairs forced them to cease filming, according to a new release.
As the crew prepared to pack up and go, Kim Roberts and her husband Scott, a streetwise couple trapped in the eye of the storm, approached Deal and Lessin at the Alexandria Red Cross shelter and insisted they take a look at her footage, Deal said.
Deal said he and Lessin were not wary of viewing Roberts’ footage.
“If you meet such a dynamic couple like Kim and Scott and they offer you footage on the greatest disaster in our country, you don’t hesitate to take it,” Deal said.
The Roberts’ story also captivated Danny Glover, whose company Louverture Films helped finance the documentary.
“I felt so empowered by Kim and Scott and by their actions,” Glover said in a news release. “Their story very clearly shows why it is critical for all people to have a voice.”
Roberts’ raw footage captured the Lower 9th Ward and many of its residents before, during and after the storm hit.
Roberts was able to film as the waters rose through her house and forced her and several others to forge the river that was once the street, Deal said.
What people saw on the news cannot compare to Roberts’ home video of Katrina’s aftermath, Lessin said. “[Roberts] is on the ground telling the story from the inside out. The nation saw it from the outside in.”
The rest of the country saw the same images, but they were nothing like Roberts’ footage, she said.
The storm is not the only subject of the documentary. It has several deeper themes, Lessin said.
“It is about hope and resilience and survival and redemption,” Lessin said. “It is about beating the odds.”
The Roberts lost family members, their home and their community, yet they were still able to rebuild their lives and transform themselves, Lessin said.
Roberts finding her voice is another important aspect of the film, she said.
Roberts, also known as “Black Kold Madina,” is an aspiring rap artist and part of New Orleans’ underground hip hop scene. Some of Roberts’ songs are featured in the film, Lessin said.
“It is such an emotional film and is raw in a lot of ways,” Deal said. “The audience became extremely engaged in it.”
“Trouble the Water” was not the only premiere for the Roberts family that weekend. Shortly after the audience’s standing ovation, a nine-month-pregnant Roberts’ water broke.
She gave birth to a baby girl the next morning.
The film has not been picked up by a distributor, Deal and Lessin said, but they hope it will be released within the next several months. They also want to do screenings in New Orleans.
“This is for the rest of the country and the rest of the world who only saw what happened on television,” Lessin said. “The rest of the country may have moved on, but New Orleans is still struggling.”
—-Contact Drew Belle Zerby at [email protected]