A scene from 2006′s ‘When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts’ (Photo: Everett Collection)
This week marks a decade since Hurricane Katrina ravaged the city of New Orleans, flooding the Louisiana mecca’s streets, destroying its homes, and displacing thousands of its residents. It was a crisis of historic proportions, and ten years later, the home of Mardi Gras, Dixieland music, the Saints and gumbo is still picking up the pieces from this natural — and national — disaster.
A calamity caused by wind and water as well as a host of human errors, the story of Hurricane Katrina has received less treatment from filmmakers than one might imagine, with only a handful of documentaries tackling both the tempest’s horrors and its difficult aftermath. Yet if the number of non-fiction films about Katrina is relatively small in number, there remain a few standouts that examine the still-relevant topic from myriad perspectives. On the anniversary of this most awful chapter in American history, we celebrate five documentaries that got to the heart of the storm.
Spike Lee filming‘When the Levees Broke’ (Photo: Everett Collection)
When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (2006)
Spike Lee may be, first and foremost, a cinematic dramatist, but he more than proved his non-fiction brilliance with this Emmy-winning two-parter, which premiered stateside on HBO one year after Katrina hit. Given that it was shot more or less immediately after Katrina struck, Lee’s film has a raw immediacy that’s never less than bracing, be it in his interviews with hosts of locals — including politicians, journalists, engineers and everyday citizens — or in his sorrowful vistas of the devastated city itself.
Lee plumbs the reasons behind the levees’ failure while maintaining a moving focus on those residents – such as Wilhelmina Blanchard, mother of the soundtrack’s composer Terence, who visits the rubble that once was her home – left to rebuild (or leave for parts unknown) and providing a historical overview of New Orleans in order to truly capture what was demolished by Katrina. Poignant and infuriating in equal measure, it continues to be the defining work about the Hurricane.
Available to stream via HBO GO, Amazon and YouTube, and available to rent via Netflix.
If God is Willing and da Creek Don’t Rise (2010)
A few years after When the Levees Broke, Lee – taking his inspiration from Michael Apted’s Up series, which revisits the same people every seven years – returned to the Big Easy to follow up with many of his prior film’s subjects. What he discovered was a complicated portrait of both despair and hope, the former sparked by public housing projects failures and tales of police brutality, and the latter created by a court ruling about culpability for the levees’ failures, as well as by the emergence of the Saints, the NFL’s perennial losers, as Super Bowl XLIV champions.
Lee’s follow-up doesn’t have quite the same depth and breadth as its predecessor, but it nonetheless resonates as a vital part of an ongoing story about community ties, cultural strength, and local and national political responsibility for the public good in times of emergency.
Available to stream via HBO GO and Amazon, and available to rent via Netflix.
Trouble the Water (2008)
Outraged at TV news footage, directors Tia Lessin and Carl Deal set out to New Orleans during Katrina with the idea of making a documentary – only to almost immediately come into contact with Ninth Ward residents Kim and Scott Roberts, who not only endured the maelstrom first-hand, but recorded their experiences on a personal camcorder. That footage is nothing short of astonishing, though Trouble the Water soon becomes less about Kim and Scott’s tribulations during Katrina, and more about the nightmare that followed.
Following the couple as the Roberts struggle to receive FEMA payments — and, later, find a residence — the film uses the couple’s ordeal to touch upon virtually every aspect of the Katrina crisis: the inadequacy of local, state and federal government efforts, the racial and socio-economic issues it brought to the fore, and the individual and communal selflessness shown by many. It’s a heartrending example of capturing a disaster’s sweeping tragedy through the perspective of one small-scale story.
Available to stream via Amazon and Hulu, and available to rent via Netflix.
Kamp Katrina (2007)
Also eschewing a wider investigation of Katrina in favor of concentrating on one of New Orleans’ many post-storm stories, Ashley Sabin and David Redmon’s Kamp Katrina details the efforts of Upper Ninth Ward resident David Cross (a home-repair business owner) and his Native American wife Ms. Pearl to aid those in dire straits. To do so, they allowed locals to live in their backyard, so long as those new guests agreed to look for jobs (and not cause a ruckus).
Given that many of Cross and Ms. Pearl’s temporary tenants were drug users and small-time crooks, trouble soon ensues, though directors Sabin and Redmon are less interested in the petty squabbles of New Orleans’ displaced poor than in the spirit of sacrifice and generosity driving this makeshift camp. Buoyed by touching panoramas of the city, it locates the inherent goodness of people even during the worst of situations, and the not-inconsiderable difficulty of maintaining such positivity amidst so much hardship.
Available to rent via Netflix.
A scene from‘The Axe in the Attic’ (Photo:Lucia Small & Ed Pincus/theaxeintheattic.com)
The Axe in the Attic (2007)
Like Trouble the Water, The Axe in the Attic is the byproduct of its makers’ grief over Katrina. Using a rough-around-the-edges verité style, this documentary follows filmmaker Lucia Small as she convinces collaborator Ed Pincus to come out of retirement and join her on a road trip from New England to New Orleans. Along their journey, they encounter a variety of residents left homeless by the storm, each of them boasting a similar story of loss, heartbreak, shock and anger.
Once they arrive in the city, the directors are so appalled by the circ*mstances of residents they meet that they decide to provide many people with financial assistance — an act that turns The Axe in the Attic into an interesting case study on the boundaries between non-fiction filmmakers and their subjects. Ultimately more moving, however, is Small and Pincus’ on-the-fly snapshots of the decimated Gulf Region, its once lush and beautiful landscape now reduced to a veritable wasteland marked by streets littered with garbage and debris, and dotted with houses torn apart and, in some cases, literally perched on trees.
Available to rent via Netflix.
 - Shopify)