Trouble the Water

Trouble the Water. It's not about a hurricane; it's about America. Trouble the Water is an intimate portrait of a community abandoned long before Hurricane Katrina hit, and a redemptive tale of a couple surviving failed levees, bungling bureaucrats, armed soldiers and their own troubled past.

Trouble the Water opens the day the filmmakers meet 24- year old rapper and drug dealer Kimberly Rivers Roberts and her husband Scott at a Red Cross shelter in central Louisiana, then flashes back two weeks, with Kimberly turning her new video camera on herself and her neighbors trapped during the floods in the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans. Like tens of thousands of others without the resources to evacuate, the Roberts are preparing to ride out the storm in their one-story home.

Weaving 15 minutes of visceral home movie footage shot the day before and the morning of the storm with archival news segments, other home video, and cinema vérité footage they filmed over two years, directors Tia Lessin and Carl Deal document an intimate journey of two seemingly unlikely heroes who survive the hurricane and seize the chance for a new beginning.

With this intimate and emotional story, Trouble the Water delves into issues of race, class, and the role of government, issues that continue to haunt America years after the levees failed in New Orleans.

Trailer

Credits

Directors//Producers: Tia Lessin, Carl Deal
Executive Producers: Joslyn Barnes, Danny Glover, Todd Olson, David Alcaro
Cinematographers: PJ Raval, Kimberly Rivers Roberts
Editor/Co-Producer: T. Woody Richman
Composer: Davidge/Del Naja
Introducing the music of Black Cold Medina
Total Running Time: 96 min.
Website: www.troublethewaterfilm.com

About The Filmmakers

TIA LESSIN is an Academy Award nominee and a two-time Emmy Award nominee. She was co-producer of Michael Moore’s latest film, Capitalism: A Love Story, as well as supervising producer of Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 and his Bowling for Columbine. Among Lessin’s other film credits include line producer on Martin Scorsese’s No Direction Home: Bob Dylan and coordinating producer on Moore’s The Big One. She is a Sundance Institute Fellow, and she has received the Open Society Institute’s Katrina Media Fellowship, the L’Oreal Women of Vision Award and the Sidney Hillman Prize for Broadcast Journalism.

CARL DEAL is an Academy Award nominee, a Sundance Institute Fellow and was a juror at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. He was archival producer of Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/11, and has contributed to many other films, among them, Christopher Quinn’s God Grew Tired of Us, Henry Alex Rubin and Dana Adam Shapiro’s Murderball, and Amir Bar-Lev’s My Kid Could Paint That. Deal received the 2005 FOCAL International/Associated Press Library Award for best use of footage in a feature film. Previously, as a broadcast news producer and journalist, Deal reported throughout the US, Latin America and in Iraq. He is a graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, which awarded him its social justice prize. He has written investigative reports on environmental, civil and criminal justice for Greenpeace, Amnesty International and Public Citizen.

Awards (selected)

Academy Award Nominee: Best Documentary Feature
AFI/SilverDocs: Special Jury Prize
Council on Foundations Film & Video Festival: Henry Hampton Award
Full Frame Documentary Festival: Grand Jury Prize
Gotham Independent Film Award: Best Documentary
NAACP Image Award Nominee: Outstanding Documentary
Producers Guild of America Award Nominee: Feature Documentary
Sundance Film Festival: Grand Jury Prize—US Documentary Competition