A Twenty-Dollar Camera Makes History

Tia Lessin did not set out to profile survivors of Hurricane Katrina when she and her life partner, Carl Deal, began shooting their Oscar-nominated documentary, “Trouble the Water,” in New Orleans, one week after the storm hit in late summer 2005. Instead, the co-directors planned to chronicle the thousands of Louisiana National Guard soldiers returning from Iraq to assist in the disaster relief.

A few days into their trip, however, it appeared that the directors might have to pack up and return home to New York. National Guard officials seemed wary of the independent filmmakers and weren’t giving them access to interviews. One even mumbled that “‘Fahrenheit 9/11’ had screwed things up” for documentarians — apparently unaware that Lessin had been a producer on “Fahrenheit” and a longtime associate of its provocative director, Michael Moore.

As Lessin continued to argue with the official, Deal, his camera running, followed some soldiers into a nearby Red Cross shelter, at which point a charismatic 24-year-old literally walked into his camera frame. She introduced herself as Kimberly Roberts, pointed out her husband, Scott, and announced that she had the real story about what had befallen impoverished residents due to Katrina.

“Almost immediately, we knew we had a new subject for our film,” Lessin said in a phone interview from San Francisco, where she was promoting the film.

She learned that the Roberts, an African American couple from New Orleans’ Ninth Ward, had had their car stolen three weeks before the hurricane. And that Kimberly just before the storm had purchased a camcorder for $20 and throughout the crisis turned the lens on herself and others who did not have the means to flee.

Roberts, who becomes the main character of “Trouble the Water,” realized even amid the chaos and terror that her harrowing video of waters rising and people cowering in her attic would be astounding historical footage.

“What I’ve got, I’ve been saving it, ’cause I don’t want to give it to nobody local,” she told Lessin soon after they met. “This needs to be worldwide. ’Cause all the footage I’ve seen on TV, nobody got what I got. I got right there in the hurricane.”

Lessin, the daughter and granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, recognized the extraordinary survivor spirit in Roberts, and she and Deal immediately saw an opportunity for collaboration. Roberts’ raw footage, combined with the documentarians’ own work, became their film.

Robert’s history and her trauma during Katrina and afterward became a through-line for a larger story about the hurricane and its aftermath. “Trouble the Water” weaves back and forth in time, describing how Roberts lost her mother to AIDS when she was 13, how she sold drugs and lived on the streets and then cleaned up her act, moved to the Ninth Ward and, before Katrina hit, aspired to become a rap artist.

The documentary reveals how Roberts used her street smarts to brave and flee the floodwaters and strove to assist both friends and strangers. She also stuck around to rebuild her community in the aftermath.

“If … destruction comes, I want to be here to tell people we had a world,” Roberts says on tape as the storm approaches. When she realized she wouldn’t be able to leave, she thought, “If I die, I hope somebody finds this camera.”

“Trouble the Water” won the 2008 Sundance Film Festival grand jury award for best documentary, as well as stellar reviews. TIME magazine called it “an endlessly moving, artlessly magnificent tribute to people the government didn’t think worth saving.”

Lessin, 44, said her approach to the project was informed by her own family history. Although she is careful not to equate the Holocaust with Katrina, she sees parallels in the destruction of tightly knit communities, the abandonment by government of its most vulnerable citizens and a Diaspora of refugees far from their homes.

“I understand from my own experience that this kind of tragedy impacts generations,” she said. “Something like Katrina doesn’t just happen to people and they move on. It has a legacy, and we will see that legacy unfold in the case of New Orleans for the next 40 years.”

The legacy of the Holocaust has deeply affected Lessin’s own life and work. As a girl, she pored through the memorial book that commemorated her maternal grandmother’s razed town. Her grandfather had the savvy to obtain passage to Trinidad — the only place he knew of where one could flee without a passport, escaping there with his wife and their 6-year-old daughter, Lessin’s mother. But when he learned of the death of his parents six years later, he fell into a severe depression and died destitute in Chicago.

“At the time, my grandmother was in her 30s, and she didn’t speak any English,” Lessin said. “She remarried, got work as a garment worker, made decent wages. But the pain and desperate sadness of her loss haunted her every day.”

Lessin’s mother grew up to become an attorney with the Justice Department; the filmmaker’s father was a lawyer with the Environmental Protection Agency. “They were liberals who believed in the role of government in helping its citizens,” Lessin said.

She inherited their Jewish passion for social justice, studying the American labor movement at Cornell University and helping organize restaurant workers on Capitol Hill. When her arrest for civil disobedience made the television news, Lessin saw the power of the media in advancing a cause and decided to become a documentary filmmaker.

Her first professional job in the early 1990s was preparing a video exhibition for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum on how the U.S. government had failed to help Jews escape the Final Solution. She also interviewed descendants of Wounded Knee survivors for “Shadow of Hate,” Charles Guggenheim’s film about racial and religious intolerance. And then she saw the pilot for Michael Moore’s satirical television program, “TV Nation.”

“It had been called the smartest and funniest show on television, but it was also highly political, and I realized you could do all those things at once,” Lessin said. “I vowed to get a job on that show by hook or by crook.”

Lessin not only got her wish, she also went on to work as a producer for Moore on films such as “The Awful Truth” and “Bowling For Columbine,” sometimes stepping in to do interviews when “Michael’s mere presence might set people off.”

“He taught me to be completely unapologetic about storytelling, to never take no for an answer and that humor sometimes is a more potent weapon than outrage,” Lessin said. “Michael also was the pioneer of using personal voice to draw people into a story,” which we used for ‘Trouble the Water.’ Although Carl and I do not [present] ourselves in the movie, we definitely use the personal voice of Kimberly Roberts.”

Indeed, Roberts’ voice is so compelling that “Trouble the Water” has been cited alongside Spike Lee’s “When the Levees Broke” as one of the most important films to emerge about Katrina. The film also is among “the most eloquent records we have of a tragedy that brought out some of the most impressively alive men and women in New Orleans,” a reviewer wrote in The New Yorker.

Lessin hopes the movie will counter the cliché of Katrina survivors as victims.

“It’s a story,” she said, “about the resilience of both a couple and a community.”