TROUBLE THE WATER (2008), dir. Tia Lessin and Carl Deal and Kimberly Rivers Roberts

Sometimes a great film happens by accident. According to “Trouble the Water’s” production notes, Lessin and Deal had planned a movie about soldiers serving in Iraq who returned home to New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. However, after the National Guard cut off their access, they took a side trip to a nearby Red Cross shelter, where they encountered Kimberly Rivers Roberts and her husband Scott. The meeting ended up changing the course of the film.

One week earlier, the Roberts’ had escaped the flooded city themselves, but not without having to take the initiative for their own survival. “Trouble the Water” shows the experience of Hurricane Katrina from their perspective, the impact of which feels immediate and authentic. But the film also chronicles their attempts to build a new future afterward, and tries to examine why thousands of residents, many of whom were poor or minority, were seemingly abandoned by the state and federal government before and after the storm.

The movie could have consisted of talking heads and sound bytes, but Kimberly Roberts brought something besides her own words and memories: roughly two hours of videotape shot before, during, and after the storm. The footage allows Lessin and Deal to structure things differently from a standard documentary: the first half cuts back-and-forth between present times and the footage, and Roberts’ home movies become akin to the flashback sequences found in non-documentary narratives.

Seeing Kimberly and Scott, their low-income neighborhood, and their friends and relatives prior to Katrina's landfall makes the aftermath all the more dramatic. In total, roughly 15 minutes of Kimberly’s video before and during the storm gets used, and it’s easily the most riveting part of the film: there is palpable tension in the air as she interviews relatives and acquaintances waiting for the inevitable to arrive, while the footage shot during the storm itself consists of murky violence as the elements threaten to tear the Roberts’ world apart.

Kimberly’s video captures just how dire the situation was, but also shows people rising to the occasion. “I never thought God would have use for a man like me,” says a man named Larry who, utilizing a punching bag as a flotation device, rescues the Roberts’ and some family members who are holed up in an attic. Indeed, a recurring theme in “Trouble the Water” is redemption: most of the main characters, including Kimberly and Scott, lived life hard and fast on the mean streets. After Katrina, however, they are helping the smaller, frailer, and older get out of New Orleans alive – what the state and federal authorities failed to do, the movie can’t help pointing out.

According to characters in the film, help from either the state or National Guard did not materialize for days, and when the military did arrive, their priorities leaned more toward safeguarding property than providing relief. A confrontation between residents and armed soldiers over the use of an abandoned Navy base is told from multiple perspectives; unfortunately, the military never quite comes out looking pristine in either telling.

Occasionally, the tone gets a little too snarky, such as when a soldier’s comment that “civilians don’t know the basics of survival” is juxtaposed with Scott’s story of breaking into a high school and stealing food from vending machines. The gut reaction is to respond, “Hey, it may be vandalism, but they all survived, didn’t they?”

If “Trouble the Water” has a potential flaw, it isn’t the human dramas captured by Lessin, Deal, or Kimberly Roberts, the latter an aspiring rap artist whose impromptu performance of a song called “Amazing” provides the film its emotional catharsis. Rather, it’s the fact Lessin and Deal have a history working with documentary-maker Michael Moore, whose mention in the press notes alone raises questions about a possible liberal bias. Does it feel as if more effort could have gone into getting the Bush administration’s side of why the response supposedly went badly? Maybe, but there’s no denying the power of the Roberts’ footage, and lest we forget, they are the ones who lived through the storm.

Overall rating: ***1/2 (out of ****)