Streaming: Trouble the Water

As inspirational as it is harrowing.

Wendy Ide, Times UK

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An aspiring New Orleans rapper turns a video camera on herself and her neighbors—and captures Hurricane Katrina and its insidious after-effects—in this remarkable look at a community under siege from both a sudden natural disaster and a decades-long grind of institutional and economic racism. Winner of the Documentary Grand Prize at the 2008 Sundance Festival, Trouble the Water intertwines the home videos of amateur musician and "street hustler" Kimberly Rivers Roberts with the work of documentary film veterans Tia Lessin and Carl Deal (frequent Michael Moore collaborators), who showcase the attempts by Roberts and her community to recover. Both its anger and love fueled by the "giant personality" at its core, Trouble the Water pulls no punches when hitting the appropriate targets such as government inaction during the storm, bureaucratic incompetence afterwards, continuing media distortions, economic and racial biases, and more; while made thirteen years ago, it speaks just as clearly to today's America.

Jason Sanders
FILM DETAILS 
Cinematographer
  • PJ Raval
  • Kimberly Rivers Roberts
Print Info
  • Color
  • Digital streaming
  • 93 mins
Source
  • Zeitgeist Films