January
25
Sundance's Trouble the Water Reveals New Orleans Heroine
Ten days after Hurricane Katrina, documentary filmmakers Tia Lessin and Carl Deal were all set to shoot a film about National Guard troops being redeployed more than 7000 miles from Iraq to New Orleans to cope with the storm’s aftermath. Then the duo got shut down—thanks to their credits on Fahrenheit 9/11.
But thanks to years of training with Michael Moore, Lessin and Deal weren’t going to take no for an answer. “We didn’t set out to make any particular doc,” says Deal. “We wanted to find a different story of Katrina that wasn’t the one filtering through news media and newsrooms.”
They found a doozy. (UPDATE: Trouble the Water won the doc jury prize at Sundance.)
When the duo wandered across the street to a Red Cross shelter with their cameras to interview some of the refugees from the storm, Kimberly Rivers Roberts walked into the frame and told them that they really needed to see the video she had shot during Katrina. “Kimberly and Scott wanted to get the word out there, and didn’t know how to do it,” says Deal. “They were thinking bigger than local TV crews.”
Skeptical, Deal and Lessin checked out Roberts’ footage on the little Sony Hi-8 camcorder that she had bought on the street for $20 the week before the storm, planning to use it for birthday parties and reunions. Stuck in town as the storm approached, Roberts chronicled her Lower 9th Ward neighborhood in the hours before the hurricane hit. Other poor folks with no way to leave town were also left behind. The city of New Orleans had ordered an evacuation, but sent no buses to ferry the neediest residents out of the area.
Roberts stocked up on supplies, sold a bit of weed, and continued shooting and narrating throughout the ordeal of the storm: the rising floodwaters, the 12 neighbors who joined them in their attic crawlspace, and the daring rescue from a neighbor across the street, who used a punching bag as a flotation device to ferry people over to a bigger house with a second story, one by one. These people knew they were in danger of losing their lives.
Days after the storm was over and the flood had receded, the Scotts were feeding their neighbors from their dwindling stockpile and there was still no sign of rescue. So Kimberly and husband Scott commandeered a truck, piled their neighbors into it and drove out of town. They saved 25 people. As they were on their way out of New Orleans, the National Guard was coming in.
The filmmakers already had cleared the necessary red tape to enter the central city, and were among the first to return on September 16, with the two Roberts in tow. “It was like Armageddon, the end of the world,” says Deal. “The stench was practically unbearable. There wasn’t a single civilian, just a few soldiers, vehicles, wild dogs and lots of helicopters, which is revealing.”
As Deal and Lessin spent the day filming the 9th Ward, they found it muddy and deserted. But the Roberts’ joyful animals were home. And Kimberly rescued her prize possession: a photo of her mother, who died of AIDs when she was thirteen.
Trouble the Water intercuts Roberts’ amazing footage with the story of how this couple--who had been drug dealers scrapping for survival in a corner of the U.S. that had long been neglected by mainstream America-- during Hurricane Katrina became heroes who saved their neighbors and in the course of beginning a new life after the storm, turned themselves around.
The filmmakers raised money independently from George Soros, Creative Capital, Danny Glover and others to shoot and finish Trouble the Water, which met an enthusiastic response at Sundance, where Lessin and Deal hope to land a theatrical distributor. They found it tough to fuse Roberts’ homevideo with their more professional 16 mm and hi-def video footage, without using a narrator. “They’re insiders looking out,” says Lessin, “and we’re outsiders looking in. We’re white, and they’re African-American from New Orleans’ poorest ward. We’re professional documentary filmmakers, they’re amateur camera shooters. And yet they shot the most riveting material we’ve ever seen.”
The same survival instinct that led the Roberts to deal drugs helped them to endure the storm and escape New Orleans. “They knew no one was going to come and save them,” says Lessin. “So they saved themselves and 25 others too. Kim has long had a gift for turning shit into something good. Katrina was a tragedy that they wished hadn’t happened but they made the best of it they could.”
Roberts didn’t realize she was a heroine to her neighbors and the old people she looked after until she saw herself through their eyes in the film. One day the filmmakers came upon the house where she was staying and found the windows shaking. Roberts had found a rap tape that she had made. “The rapping was a revelation,” says Deal, who wound up including several of her songs in the movie.
Lessin and Deal shot some of the film’s most moving footage as they drove by the Astrodome as thousands of people, many of them ill and elderly, waited, desolated and marooned. “This is just one story out of thousands of stories,” Deal says. “The Roberts are very conscious that they represent other people.”
Even though Kimberly was nine months pregnant, she and Scott flew to Sundance for the Sunday morning Library Center screening of Trouble the Water. After the film played to rousing emotional response, during the Q & A Roberts told the crowd, "I was determined to get here even if I had a baby in Utah."
Sure enough, later that night, Kimberly was rushed down the mountain to a Salt Lake City hospital to give birth to her first child, baby girl Skyy Kaylen Rivers Roberts, born early the next morning at 6:14 AM, weighing seven pounds, one ounce. She and her husband brought the newborn back up to the fest several days later.
“The media saw everyone in New Orleans as victims or looters," says Lessin. "These guys are nobody’s victims. They’re struggling to transform their lives. Nothing’s easy. Drugs are behind them. They’re back home.”
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Thank you for this great post. You covered so much more on this movie than I have seen so far.
Do you know of anyone covering New Orleans' rampant and historical addiction to Heroine, the drug, before-during-after the levees failed and flooded the city? That is an 800 pound doped gorilla in the living room, and I have not seen any view of it.
Please keep us posted. Feel free to email me from profile.
Thanks again for keeping the lights on in New Orleans.
Bruce
editor~New Orleans News Ladder
Posted by: New Orleans News Ladder | January 26, 2008 at 07:55 AM
Anne--
I indirectly addressed a point in my review that's worth considering about TROUBLE THE WATER, but which you didn't mention in your blog piece.
While the film certainly makes the viewer root for Kimberley and Scott and the folks they helped (and who helped them), I began to ponder afterwards a troubling ethical problem with the film. Didn't it seem clear, particularly in the final third, that Kimberley was using this project as a means to kick-start her aspirations as a rap singer/songwriter? I wondered if--and the film throws enough evidence up on screen to more than suggest this--beyond the fact that she had extraordinary homevid footage of Katrina on her block and in her house, she wasn't also interested in Lessin and Deal as a means to another, very non-Katrina end.
This raises an ethical issue for the filmmakers, who in the end decided to participate in Kim's music promotion. (Observe the closing credits.) In the days since viewing what I'll continue to argue is an immensely flawed and uneven doc (and far from the best in the section--the jury story is another matter, much of it involving Eugene Jarecki, I think), this matter has clouded the film for me. I'm not alone,judging by conversations I've had since the screening.
But I also think that Kim's glorious moment as a new mom naturally swept this to the side. Which is fine and natural: A birth takes precedence over everything. The issue remains,though, and I'm surprised that no one on our reporting team has explored it.
Best!
Bob
Posted by: Robert Koehler | January 27, 2008 at 04:00 PM
I respectfully disagree with your take on this film. It was the best film I saw at Sundance. I felt it was a strong Katrina entry, and showed a far different point of view than any we had seen thus far. I was moved by Kimberly: her moxy, narrative gifts, instinctive need to tell the story as it unfolded, heroism, survival skills, remarkable turnaround and the way the filmmaking process helped her to see herself in a new light. I wasn't bothered by the rap thing at all. It never occurred to me. The filmmakers accidentally came upon her performing to a mix tape that she thought had been forever lost. They had no idea she rapped at all, nor had she ever told them.
btw, the film's edit needs a new pass--it is often confusing. I grant you that.
Posted by: Anne Thompson | January 27, 2008 at 04:03 PM
i just have to wonder, anne, how many films you saw here if trouble the water was the best film you saw....i mean, really, really , the best you saw? really? did you see ballast? man on wire? frozen river?
regardless of how the subject and filmmakers encountered each other (and the pressbook indicates that the subject intro'd themselves to the filmmakers, who had intended to make an entirely different Katrina film), i think the ethical issue remains.
the film, in actuality, looks, sounds and is unfinished. its assembly is haphazard at points, and its sense of chronology is needlessly confusing. kim's footage was, for me, far and away the highlight of the film.
Posted by: Robert Koehler | January 27, 2008 at 04:09 PM
you are right to ask that question. I didn't see nearly enough. 14 films--and I left Wednesday night. the films you mention are films that I am dying to see. that said, I'm not the only one who thought Trouble the Water the best doc I saw at Sundance--so did the doc jury!
Posted by: Anne Thompson | January 27, 2008 at 04:13 PM
ooooh, a dustup among varietoids. I too thought "Trouble" was among the best i saw in Park City (i saw 32 films,) which doesn't mean it can't be faulted. But what other film had its heart? "Man on Wire" maybe, but a very different animal. The point, i think, is that competitions among films (docs or otherwise) are very good for creating festival narrative, and not much else.
xxxjohn A.
Posted by: john anderson | January 27, 2008 at 10:57 PM
I have not seen the movie yet, but heard about it from Carl Deal's parents in Illinois. Carl's father and I were friends at the University of Kansas and the Univ of Illinois in the early 70s. Carl (filmmaker) was just a little boy then. His aunt, Genevieve, lives here in Topeka, KS where I now live. Just wanted to express my congratulations and best wishes to "Carlitos" on his film and the prize at Sundance. I'm a film buff and was a co-founder of the Kansas Silent Film Festival held in Topeka annually. website:
www.kssilentfilmfest.org
Regards, Jim Rhodes
Posted by: Jim Rhodes | February 02, 2008 at 08:08 AM
This was the best documentary that I've ever seen!!! Please take the time to watch it.
Posted by: aj | April 07, 2008 at 10:04 AM
Anne, I haven't yet seen the film as it was just brought ot my attention today. I will make it a point to see it over the weekend. I am responding to you original post. I grew up in the central (bayou) part of Louisian and am caucasin. Your reference to " a corner of the U.S. that had long been neglected by mainstream America" is in more areas of La. than many know about.
Louisiana is filled with a culture that you fend for yourself and is prevelant in the small communities. I applaud that the movie shows some of the poor people but time and time again I am distraught how the rest of the poor people in that state are so dismissed. I would hope that at some point a film could be developed of the truth about life in Louisiana.
I know for me this film is a must see as I happen to grow up POOR.
Posted by: Joe Soileau | August 21, 2008 at 11:41 AM
I still like Trouble the Water more than Frozen River or Man on Wire--both of which are great films. I still haven't seen Ballast--will probably catch that in Toronto. It's not a question of how well this doc was executed technically, or the quality of the writing and direction. It's the lightning in a bottle aspect of this seemingly unremarkable 9th Ward marginal lowlife woman who had no idea she was capable of being a hero until Hurricane Katrina revealed to her and the folks around her who she really was. That is truly moving.
Posted by: anne thompson | August 22, 2008 at 11:44 AM