Oscar watch: Trouble the Water

Kim Voynar writes of Trouble the Water, the Oscar-nominated documentary about struggles to survive and efforts to thrive in post-Katrina New Orleans:

I first saw the film at Sundance last year, where it won the Grand Jury Prize for documentary, and it was one of my favorite films of that year's fest. As I walked to the shuttle stop after the film, I was behind two obviously well-off, white couples (the women were both wearing ankle-length fur coats and were glittering with diamonds), and overheard a conversation that's stayed with me for over a year.

One woman said to her husband that she didn't like "those black people" the film focused on, and wondered why the filmmakers had chosen to focus on Kimberly Rivers Roberts and her husband, Scott; the husband of the other woman offered that he felt that [Tia] Lessin and [Carl] Deal, who are white, had exploited their black subjects to make a film with a liberal political slant. And I remember thinking to myself, "Wow, is that really all these people got out of the film we just saw?"

You can read more of Voynar's insightful piece -- which includes recent comments by documentarians Carl Deal and Tia Lessin -- here.

Looking for Trouble, they found it

Documentarians Carl Deal and Tia Lessin were all set to make a movie about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina — specifically about National Guardsmen newly returned from Iraq who were readying to restore order in storm-battered New Orleans — when a force of nature named Kimberly River Roberts gate-crashed into their project.

A would-be rapper and self-described "street hustler," Kimberly, a large, handsome African-American woman of 24, aptly described by film critic David Denby as having the "presence of lioness," approached the filmmakers at a Red Cross shelter near the National Guard armory in Alexandria, La. She told them that she and her husband, Scott Roberts, had remained in their Lower Ninth Ward home when Katrina slammed into New Orleans. And that she had captured images of rising waters and mounting panic with her newly purchased camcorder.

Deal and Lessin were amazed by her footage. But they were even more impressed by Kimberly, who ultimately became, along with her husband, the centerpiece of Trouble the Water, an extraordinary documentary about breached levees, broken promises and rebuilt lives. You can read my Houston Chronicle interview with the filmmakers here.