Reminders of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina are never too far, but little did we know that the story began long before the storm ever hit.
The critically acclaimed documentary “Trouble the Water,” winner of the 2008 Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival will be playing at the James Bridges Theater today at 7:30 p.m. The screening is free and open to the public with a special Q&A with one of the film’s directors, Tia Lessin.
Directed by Lessin and Carl Deal, who also served as producers on the Michael Moore documentaries “Fahrenheit 9/11″ and “Bowling for Columbine,” the film follows self-described street hustlers Kimberly and Scott Roberts who capture their experience of Hurricane Katrina in the Lower 9th Ward from the personal lens of their Hi-8 video camera.
The footage they shot before and during the hurricane anchors the film’s larger social commentary.
“All of America was horrified by the atrocities in the Gulf Coast,” Lessin said. “But what we fail to see was that (these people) were abandoned long before Katrina struck.”
The directors never envisioned meeting Kimberly and Scott. As documentary filmmakers, Lessin and Deal first flew to Central Louisiana to make sense of why New Orleans had not been evacuated early enough. It was through exploring and talking to different people in the region that they met their protagonists.
“You meet people and characters of interest you want to follow,” said Lessin, citing that the best documentaries are neither scripted nor cast.
The unique point of view in “Trouble the Water” from Kimberly’s shaky handheld camera and real-time commentary only lasted until day one of the hurricane, after the levees broke.
After her camera battery died, the filmmakers gathered close to 160 hours of footage following the couple and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina over a two-and-a-half-year period.
The real challenge of the film involved finding additional material that would match the raw footage shot by Kim and Scott. Two hours of their original video was reduced to 15 minutes with the rest of the film, which instills a combination of production footage, archival footage and audio from broadcasts and off-air news sources.
Among this footage, Lessin said, was archival news footage of what the rest of the country was seeing.
“The news media dropped the ball weeks after the disaster. We wanted to go on the ground to tell a multidimensional indictment of poverty in America,” Lessin said.
After seeing the film, actor Danny Glover and his partner at Louverture Films joined the project as executive producers.
The screening of “Trouble the Water” is part of the ongoing Documentary Salon series created by UCLA film and television Professor Marina Goldovskaya.
Goldovskaya said she chose the film not only because it was short-listed for the Oscars but because she felt it was not properly distributed in the Los Angeles area.
“I have my own taste for documentaries, but for what is relevant today, this film is such a human piece of history, a troubling piece of history of how people reacted and how they survived,” she said.
As a world renowned documentary filmmaker herself, Goldovskaya saw “Trouble the Water” as a metaphor for the unbreakable strength of the human spirit, citing that these are the few situations we never see on regular news channels.
“It is a film about survival. Yours, mine and everyone else. Everyone can identify with the characters,” said Goldovskaya.
Goldovskaya explains that seeing the events through the eyes of the actual characters helps the audience to relate Kimberly and Scott’s story to their own.
The film has been in the top 10 movie lists of 2008 for the New Yorker, Time magazine, and the Los Angeles Times. Currently it is on the short list for the best documentary category for this year’s Oscars and was named best documentary of 2008 by the IFP Gotham Independent Film Awards.
Lessin hopes the film will resonate with students especially on the eve of the presidential inauguration.
“I’m eager to share this film and pose a dialogue that it was not just about the hurricane, it’s about America.”