IF you watch only one documentary this year, please make it “Trouble the Water,” an Oscar-nominated film debuting tonight.
This remarkable, disturbing, raw and honest film was made in part by Kimberly Rivers Roberts, a resident of New Orleans’ 9th Ward who was living below the poverty line before Katrina hit, and partly by two filmmakers who met Kimberly and her husband Scott Roberts at a Red Cross shelter two weeks later.
Rivers, using a home video camera, began taping the day before Katrina hit, asking neighbors if they were going to stay. Many stayed because they had no way out — and the government did not provide transportation for the trapped.
Then came her unfathomable, harrowing experience — which she taped — as she and her family attempted to survive in the attic as the water rose alarmingly high in the rooms below.
Into their nightmare comes Kim’s cousin Larry, a real American hero, whom she filmed from the attic window, walking neck-deep in the flood waters, rescuing people two at a time by carrying them out. He uses a punching bag as a flotation device for those who can’t walk. Larry, incidentally, doesn’t know how to swim.
His response to his heroics? “I thank God for that day because I never knew the Lord would use a man like me.”
FEMA never arrives. Citizens dying in their homes are told by 911 operators that the government is “not providing rescue at this time.”
The film follows Kim and her family as they try to survive the days after the flood. They find a rowboat and start rescuing neighbors. Then, they’re told that the nearly-abandoned nearby Navy base has opened to accept flood refugees in the hundreds of dry rooms, where they take 20 men, women and kids.
But they’re met there by armed forces. Scott says, “We were told to get off the property before they started shooting.” And then they locked and loaded their guns.
Yet, even in the horror, there’s beauty, such as Kimberly’s brilliant, angry poetry that she sets to rap. She should be starring on “Def Poetry” — she’s that good.
If you thought that what you saw on TV was exaggerated, trust me, this film tells the real truth.
How do I know? Because I drove a truck with relief supplies to the Gulf in a citizen’s caravan, and the devastation and total breakdown of FEMA is something I’ll never forget. “Trouble the Water” is something you’ll never forget.
“Trouble The Water” Tonight at 8:30 on HBO