Director: Carl Deal and Tia Lessen
MPAA Rating: NR
Running time: 90 min.
Country of Origin: USA

[Repost of my review to promote this great documentary as, starting friday, it will be playing at the Royal Cinema in Toronto. Check local listings for other showings]

Thanks to Doc Soup (a now nationwide project exposing people to the latest and greatest in documentaries) I had the opportunity to catch the Canadian premiere of Trouble the Water, the Sundance Grand Jury Prize winning documentary about the New Orleans ninth ward experience pre-, during, and post- Hurricane Katrina. While many documentaries have been made on this subject, usually with an overt political or socio-economic bent, rarely have the survivors been given an unconditional platform from which to speak directly about their plight; even the testimonials in Spike Lee’s four-hour opus, When the Levees Broke, are framed within the four narrative acts he wishes to tell. Trouble the Water is significant and indeed perhaps notorious first and foremost because of how much it is a direct testimony; before a professional documentary filmmaker was even around, a twenty-dollar camcorder in the shaky hands of ninth ward resident, Kimberly Roberts, became the sole narrator of the story in the days leading up to and during the hurricane. As the waters rose and her family crouched in the attic fearing death, Kimberly kept the camera running, along with her mouth, talking her way through the events with the same kind of determination she would continue to show in the aftermath. As fortunate as the footage she captured was for conveying a level of drama that no amount of artifice could possibly duplicate, the real find was in fact behind the camera.

Trouble the Water opens on the herky-jerky moment when filmmakers Carl Deal and Tia Lessen are accosted by Kimberly and her husband, Scott, who come out of nowhere with the promise of a story to tell and extraordinary footage to share. In mere moments the characters emerge, toothy grins, bigger than life. Here we have white well-to-do filmmakers telling a black lower class story, inevitably race and class permeate everything. At times I felt, rightly or wrongly, a sense of imposed liberal guilt into the scenes, the awkward relationships between the survivors and the predominately white envoys, the minor intrusions of a white perspective stepping in, but for the most part, and to its credit, the film feels largely authentic, unscripted, unflattering at times, never letting Kimberly and Scott become angelic symbols of victimization. This may have less to do with direction and more to do with the persona of Kimberly, who carries the story with her swagger. It is disclosed that Scott was a drug dealer, Kimberly a rapper and former drug addict, orphaned from a mother taken by AIDS, brought up with abuse, poverty, and whatever else life could dole out to her. There are some feeble cues made to the social circumstances of the ninth ward posed as potential excuses for behavior, both by the protagonists and suggested in some of the direction (once again my liberal guilt alarm going off), but just when you think its going to play that easy card, about three-quarters into a story which has doled disappointment upon disappointment into the mix for our world-weary heroes, something utterly magical happens…

It starts off unremarkable enough: Kimberly reminds the viewer that she is a rapper and begins to play one of her songs entitled ‘Amazing’. The music is playing and as she is fussing about doing other things she starts to act out the rap to the camera. Her energy level builds, and builds, and eventually hits this crescendo, and the rap ricochets out the story of her life in all of its depravity, and just as fierce comes the refrain: ‘I don’t need you tell me I’m simply amazing, cuz I know what I am and I know what I be’. Had a poseur rapper uttered these lines it may come off as mere grandstanding but in this case, in this song, it comes out as a declaration of her independence from victimization, no longer a thing but a person flesh and blood. The audience I saw it with broke into applause, and it was very moving, and poignant, considering how in fact black people in general but in particular survivors of Hurricane Katrina are regrettably depicted as hapless victims, or looters, or whatever, this scene was the breaking of the fourth wall of all the unspoken liberal guilt agendas, all the expectations, all the framing of issues, and for a glorious couple of minutes Kimberly was Kimberly. The best single moment in a film I have seen all year.

Near the end of the film, the issues of government mismanagement and the deplorable state of affairs FEMA left people in during the wake of the hurricane are highlighted, and for good reason, although if this is the sort of film one requires, Spike Lee does a far superior job of serving the powers that be their comeuppance, in When the Levees Broke. It felt like too much of an intrusion on what is for the most part an intimate portrait of people enduring. Give me more of Scott trying to learn a trade, or Kimberly mothering disparate survivors. Small qualms for what is an otherwise stunning documentary deserving of the accolades it is receiving.

The film opens in Canada in Janurary 2009, check your local listings for elsewhere.

In the meantime enjoy this slickly done trailer: