• the217
• Movies + TV
• Never forget

Trouble the Water

Buzz says:   MPAA Rating: NR
Current Showtimes: No showtimes available

Over three years have passed since Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf coast and devastated New Orleans. When those feeble levees broke, our brothers and sisters in the Ninth Ward were left underwater and without food, shelter or rescue; it was then that our government's true colors revealed themselves to the world. Since the storm hit, only spoonfuls of help has been offered to the Ninth Ward community, while those areas that have been deemed more valuable. such as the tourist district, were soon up and running once more.

Trouble the Water was born when Ninth Ward resident and survivor Kimberly Rivers Roberts, also known as the musician Black Kold Madina, decided- just hours before the hurricane hit- that she would make a documentary to, as she put it, "show the world that we had a world before the storm." She begins by walking around her Ninth Ward community, talking to her neighbors, many of whom, like her, couldn't afford the "luxury" of evacuating.

Through the eyes of Roberts, audiences are introduced to both the horror of the hurricane itself and that of the complete absence of government support and relief efforts. Tia Lessin and Carl Deal's Trouble the Water seeks to tell the story that went untold in news and media coverage through the eyes of one woman. Resonating from its powerful imagery and voice is a message speaking both to and from the American people about the terror of natural and unnatural disaster.

Robert's personal footage of Hurricane Katrina is woven into Lessin and Deal's footage of the Roberts' return to the Ninth Ward just a few weeks later, making the story heartbreakingly human. When Kim and those who she helped rescue each try to see Hurricane Katrina as a blessing in disguise, their everyday struggle becomes painfully clear. In speaking to a national guardsman, another survivor traveling with Kim and her husband, said "I pray that you don't have to go back to Iraq, 'cause that's not our war. This is the war, right here."

We, the America people, have become far too comfortable with forgetting. While our friends and neighbors fight multiple wars in our names, natural disaster struck us here at home. Yet, it is the unnatural disaster- the absence of social conscience- that is upon us. In many ways, contemporary horrors like "War on Terror" and "Hurricane Katrina," though written in American soil, are all but forgotten as we wipe clean our bloody hands. Where is our sense of sisterhood, of brotherhood? Where is the outrage? Have we become statues nestled in our own minds- rarely thinking of that which falls outside of our backyards or lack thereof?

Trouble the Water is a film that all people, young and old, should share because it is both a powerful reminder and a message of hope. When the Roberts return to their community and take jobs that serve the rebuilding of its infrastructure, leaving their pasts behind them, they are doing what most of America has not: remembering their home, their neighbors, their community.

During filmmaker and producer Carl Deal's Q&A session after the 7:30 showing of Trouble the Water at Boardman's Art Theater last Monday, an audience member asked him what lesson he'd learned during the making of this film. Without pause, he replied, "To listen to what others are saying and forget what you think you know about others. To me, it's stepping back, and it's allowing other voices to overpower your own."