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'Trouble the Water'

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BY JOHN ANDERSON | Special to Newsday

August 22, 2008

The how-we-lost-our-home movies taken by New Orleans native Kimberly Roberts during Hurricane Katrina are the spine of "Trouble the Water," a film that's as harrowing for what Mother Nature can do as for what the U.S. government can't. Or won't. Shot predominantly from the attic of their rapidly submerging house during the worst of the storm, Roberts' visual record gives us a palpable sense of impending doom. But it's only after the Robertses - in the company of filmmakers Tia Lessin and Carl Deal - return to their battered city their crime-ridden neighborhood that the true, sustained and still-unresolved damage of Katrina becomes so terribly clear.

Unlike most of what happens in "Trouble the Water" - involving an abusive military, clueless National Guardsmen and unlikely heroes - the happenstance meeting of the two couples behind the film was economic serendipity. After all, if the Robertses had had the money or credit to rent a car and flee New Orleans, the movie (which won the top prize for U.S. documentaries at this year's Sundance Film Festival) might have never happened.

(unrated)

PLOT The story of New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina as seen through the eyes and camera of a couple who made it through the weather but weren't sure they could survive the government.

CAST Kimberly Rivers Roberts, Scott Roberts

LENGTH 1:36

PLAYING AT IFC Center and ImageNation at the Faison Firehouse Theater, Manhattan. Coming in September to Cinema Arts Centre, Huntington

BOTTOM LINE Brilliant melding of first-person footage, heart, and directors Tia Lessin and Carl Deal's documentary expertise.