Trouble the Water (2008)

I'm suprised that this is the first Katrina related documentary to be nominated for an Oscar, coming almost three years after the fact. Seeing that I have no experience in directing or producing this might be right on time for all I know. This film was very interesting to me, I actually was in New Orleans a year after Katrina and I was pretty shocked to see how much had not been accomplished.

The film has a lot of homemade footage of a family that was unable to find the means to leave the city. It shows the different stages of the storm and the family's migration to the attic, then across the street to a taller home thanks to a kind neighbor. It then follows them trying to find shelter after three days in an attic, and the inability to get any kind of government assistance with transportation or FEMA relief.

I had a fraternity brother that went down to New Orleans as part of the National Guard, his view on the plight of these people was sickening to me and exemplified by the troops very well in this movie. To think this film is bias is nieve, the government did not care about these people then, and honestly they still don't. It really brings in questions of faith and responsibility as a Christian when people dismiss the main characters as drug dealers, crackheads, and self-promoting rappers as justification for lack of assistance, because their life is just as valuable as ours. The fact that the government left hospital patients stranded and prisons without food while pointing guns at people trying to find shelter in an abandoned base makes me wonder how this story could not be portrayed in a bias fashion.

With a fairly short runtime of about an hour and a half there is some filler I could have done without. Some may find it easy to dismiss the credibility of this film over the Mrs. Roberts rapping accusing it of being self promoting; however, this is not the first documentary that has a montage sung by the narrator and the music does fit the ethnos.

Vote: 7/10

IMDB Link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1149405/

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