Trouble the Waters

I saw the most amazing documentary yesterday. My dad's friend Joslyn Barnes runs a film production company with Danny Glover called Louverture Films. They make socially-conscious movies about black people, and right now they're working on a documentary about New Orleans called Trouble the Waters. Now, I know what you're thinking, because I was thinking the same thing when Joslyn asked me if I wanted to see a rough cut of the movie: what Katrina story could they possibly tell that the 24-hour news cycle and Spike Lee haven't already covered?

But then I sat down with my dad to watch, and we were absolutely blown away. The film follows 24-year-old Kim Rivers and her husband, Scott. They lived in the 9th Ward and didn't have the money or transportation to evacuate, so they bought a lot of food, checked in with their neighbors, and holed up to ride out the storm. And they did it with a video camera. Kim filmed Katrina as it came, as the streets began to flood, as her house began to fill and they had to climb up to the attic to escape. She filmed her neighbors as they fled their homes and came to hers for food and shelter. She filmed a local drug dealer as he used a punching bag to float children and the infirm to higher ground. She filmed as she tried to save her husband, two dogs, cat, and herself, and kept filming as her group swelled to twenty people and they had to "borrow" a truck to escape. It's the most unbelievable footage of Katrina I've ever seen.

But what really makes the movie so good is that we get to know the Rivers as individuals. In all the Katrina coverage we've been choking on, the most we get are few-minute profiles of people, if that. More often, the camera just pans by black face after black face, barely pausing long enough to see the pain there before moving on. The Katrina coverage we get is obsessed with the forest and oblivious to the trees.

Trouble the Waters does the opposite. It tells the story of two people's unbelievable goodness, resourcefulness, and intelligence without the usual patronizing hypocrisy. Kim and Scott are not college professors or church deacons. They are not pillars of the community. Before the storm, they sold drugs for a living. They are normal, poor, young 9th Ward residents. Which makes their humanity and heroism all the more remarkable, and reminds us that the victims of Katrina deserved our help not because they'd earned it with their tax dollars or Mardis Gras celebrations, but because they're human, for fucks sake. And human beings are capable of the most remarkable things, even the black ones.

Joslyn and Danny are entering Trouble the Waters in Sundance in January. Keep your fingers crossed for a distribution deal. And keep an eye out for Kold Madina, incredible lyricist, my hero, and Kim's hiphop alter ego. That's her in the picture above, on the right.