Trouble the Water, an Oscar-nominated documentary released in 2008, appears as found art. At its heart, it is a story of and by Kimberly Roberts. 24 years old at the time of Katrina, she was living in the Ninth Ward with her husband Scott when the waters sundered her world. Orphaned at age 13 when her mother died of AIDS, she found herself 11 years later still seeking a way out of the world of drugs and destitution she was born into. A few weeks before the storm, she bought a Hi8 video camera from a drug dealer friend of her husband, and began using it to mimic the news stories she saw on TV.
Several blocks from the levee break, she and an accidental family sought shelter in the attic of her rented one story duplex. Small bits of heroism, luck and insouciant humanity eventually propel them 220 miles northwest to a relative’s home in Alexandria, LA. Along the way, they stop in at a shelter, and find themselves in the middle of a film crew (Tia Lessin and Carl Deal, who had previously worked with Michel Moore) attempting to document the human side of the devastation.
All of us watching the story unfold saw and heard via CNN of the patients abandoned in hospitals, prisoners with no guards at the jail, 911 dispatchers turning away distress calls, the first responders having left town with anyone else who could afford or find a car with gas. People waving help signs on rooftops, sick old folks needing wheel chairs and medicine to survive, but finding neither. Bodies found in flooded homes, federal troops turning away civilians from shelter on the Ninth Ward’s doorstep.
This film opens with Kim and Scott literally walking through the shelter’s front door, into the film Deal and Lessin are starting to create. Within five seconds, it is clear Kim is a unique force of nature. Broad of beam and gaze, in her wake follow a collection of misfits who include a wall-eyed homeless recovering junkie with the soul of a saint, a friendly giant who had towed two grandmothers and several small children to safety first on his boxing body bag, and then on a fiberglass rowboat found floating by, and her ex-dealer husband, who still carries the scar on his cheek from when she slashed his face.
In her lyrical ghetto patois, she tells about the film she has, and how she wants the world to see what really went down from the inside, when the rain fell and the waters rose and the authorities ran away. Interspersing her own jerky voiced over footage with their own more professional shots, Deal and Lessin slowly weave the entire sordid saga of this disaster through one woman’s story and connections. A few choice stock scenes from the networks appear, including a priceless shot of “Heckuva job, Brownie”, his deer in the headlights face making it quite clear that hell was what he created as he failed to do his job.
But other than those few outside clips the entire film is told not via an omniscient narrator or voice over, but through the sights and sounds of Kimberly and her people. By the end of this 90 minute wonder, every sordid rumor we heard about what went on during Katrina’s aftermath turns out to be true. And the power of an indomitable human spirit is literally sung from the rafters. For it turns out that Kimberly Rogers, in her alter ego as Black Kold Madina, is a rap poet and singer, whose impromptu performance of her own “I’m Amazing” gives us the key to her survival, and reminds us that no matter what the world throws down, it only takes one person with a razor sharp optimism to build it back up again. Your jaw will drop when you see her do her rap, and the rest of the film will fall into place. Stick around for some of the “extras” on the DVD, including the panel discussion at the New Orleans premier of the film, when executive producer Danny Glover, Deal and Lessin share the stage with Kim and Scott, whose tenuous hold on formal English doesn’t deter them from cutting straight to the truth.
4 out of 5 stars ( a little rough in production qualities), but a definite must-see. A jaw-dropper.