October 31, 2008 | Talk about being in the wrong place at the right time: Kimberly Rivers Roberts, an aspiring rapper and self-described “street hustler” living in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans, had just recently purchased a Sony camcorder in August 2005 when Hurricane Katrina slammed into her city.
Like too many other residents of their predominantly African-American neighborhood, Kimberly and her husband, Scott Roberts, lacked the wherewithal to evacuate, so they stayed put. At first, Kimberly was happy to play the part of “interviewer,” pointing her camcorder at relatives and neighbors while asking how they would ride out the storm. But then the rains came. Kimberly and Scott, along with a handful of others, wound up warily watching from their attic while waters from breached levees flooded the streets – to the point of submerging stop signs — outside their home. And throughout it all, Kimberly continued to operate her camcorder, instinctively capturing indelible images that are the heart of a powerful new movie aptly titled Trouble the Water.
Talk about getting what you need when you can’t get what you want: Tia Lessin and Carl Deal, veteran documentarians who had worked with Michael Moore on Fahrenheit 9/11, journeyed to Alexandria, La. in September 2005, hoping to make a movie about Louisiana National Guardsmen, newly redeployed from Iraq, who were charged with restoring order to post-Katrina New Orleans. But military officials proved un-cooperative, and the documentarians were ready to go home when they ran into Kimberly and Scott Roberts at a Red Cross shelter.
Trouble the Water actually captures that fortuitous first meeting, when Kimberly – a large, swaggering 24-year-old woman with a disarmingly soft smile – approached the professional filmmakers with her amateur footage, promising: “This needs to be worldwide. Ain’t nobody got what I got.” The words might sound boastful but, really, it’s not bragging when you’re stating a fact.
Lessin and Deal skillfully employ Kimberly’s stunning footage as a kind of thematic thread while fashioning a nonfiction narrative charged with alternating currents of outage and regeneration, tragedy and transcendence.
The documentarians follow Kimberly and Scott back to the Lower Ninth Ward, where the couple and their friends encounter catastrophic damage, decomposing bodies and, worse, varying degrees of indifference and incompetence on the part of city, state and federal officials.
What Kimberly captures with her camcorder is a real-life nightmare. What Lessin and Deal do is place that nightmare into a sociopolitical context, focusing on failures of foresight by specific individuals – ranging from New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin to FEMA director Michael Brown – and arrant injustices meted out by a bureaucracy seemingly designed to ignore Katrina survivors, or punish them for their inconvenient neediness. (When folks from the Roberts’ neighborhood seek shelter a few blocks away at a near-deserted Navy base near the Industrial Canal, they are turned away at gunpoint.)
Predictably, Trouble the Water is in many ways an angry film, one that persuasively argues that, to a shameful degree, the poor and black are abandoned and disenfranchised in America. (During their stay with relatives in Memphis, Kimberly and Scott meet a woman who swears she’ll never let her son join the military “to fight for a country that don’t give a damn for you.”)
But the film nonetheless concludes on a note of triumph, as Kimberly defiantly celebrates herself in a rap tune that details all the miseries she has overcome – and mind you, it’s a song she wrote long before Katrina struck – and her capacity to survive and thrive. You can’t help wanting – and maybe needing — to read into her indomitable spiritedness something like a reason for hope. For her, for other Katrina survivors, for all of us.
(Originally appeared in The Houston Chronicle)
