SELECTED PRESS COVERAGE FOR TROUBLE THE WATER
New York Times, Variety, Vanity Fair, New York Magazine and others

New York, January 30th, 2008

VANITY FAIR

Jan 23, 2008 – “At Sundance: Documentaries Take the Day” by Emily Poenisch

…But it was a documentary filmed a little closer to home that delivered on a truly exceptional level. Trouble the Water was directed by Tia Lessin and Carl Deal and tells the extraordinary story of Kimberly and Scott Rivers, a couple living in the 9th Ward who rescued a large number of fellow residents when Hurricane Katrina struck. The film incorporates 20 minutes of home video recorded by Kimberly, who purchased a video camera for $20 on a New Orleans street just prior to the storm. This footage, which captures the advent, devastation and aftermath of the storm, is one of the most powerful and immediate records ever seen, and to view it in its raw form is to feel the outrage and disgust at the abandonment of New Orleans all over again. To realize that these two people, with their checkered pasts and lack of fancy educations, had a more advanced sense of social responsibility than the very men and women elected to protect and serve American citizens is to see the ugly, gaping holes in our social preconceptions. The determination and survival of this couple is perhaps the most inspiring story of the festival, and the fact that Kimberly went into early labor the day after the film’s premiere, and gave birth to their first child in Utah, certainly speaks to that.

THE NEW YORK TIMES

January 22, 2008 - "Shopping for Films but Settling for Some Fun" by David Carr

…Beyond the joy of a new snowfall, of course, there were some messages that this indie playground was welcoming more than movie stars and dollar signs. There were plenty of those, but there were also some movies with nobody special attached that rang out against the din.

On Sunday, for instance, there was a huge ovation for “Trouble the Water,” an intensely personal documentary about Hurricane Katrina that focused on the fight for survival traced by Kimberly Rivers Roberts and Scott Roberts, two New Orleaneans left behind by nature’s brutality and government indifference. They were both present for the screening, she remarkably pregnant and remarkably happy.

And at 6:15 a.m. on Monday, Martin Luther King Day here and everywhere, she gave birth to a baby girl named Skyy Kaylen Rivers Roberts, 7 pounds 1 ounce. Hope floats, in a hurricane, in a ruined city and, yes, at a film festival infested by wannabes and commercial interests.

VARIETY

January 22, 2008 – “Buyers in Slo-Mo” by Anne Thompson and Tatiana Siegel

…Another fest favorite is "Trouble the Water," which features life-and-death footage shot by a New Orleans Ninth Ward resident during Hurricane Katrina. The crowd at the film's Sunday premiere grew animated and emotional as the story's protagonists endured their real-life quest for survival.

The film also produced the feel-good story of the fest so far, as Kimberly Rivers Roberts, who shot the harrowing footage, showed up at the premiere nine months' pregnant.

Less than 12 hours after the bow, she was en route to a Salt Lake City hospital with husband Scott Roberts -- one of the film's heroes -- to give birth to a baby girl. Press converged at the film's luncheon Monday to hear about the delivery.

SALON.COM

January 22, 2008 – “Hurricane Katrina is not over: A conversation with the filmmakers behind ‘Trouble the Water’” by Andrew O’Hehir

…I'm off to see a highly-touted no-budget Southern indie called "Ballast" very shortly, but I wanted to grab a minute to sing the praises of "Gonzo" and, even more, of a Katrina documentary called "Trouble the Water" whose Sunday premiere was one of those electrifying, emotional, unforgettable experiences that captures Sundance at its very best.

Filmmakers Tia Lessin and Carl Deal (longtime collaborators of Michael Moore's) went to Louisiana in the wake of Katrina to make a film about the Louisiana National Guard, many of whose members had just returned from Iraq to find their hometowns in sub-Third World devastation. At a northern Louisiana shelter they ran into Kim and Scott Roberts, a married couple who described themselves as "street hustlers" from New Orleans' Ninth Ward. The Robertses and their friends had stayed through the storm, as the nearby levees broke and their neighborhood drowned, and Kim -- an irrepressible trash talker, aspiring rap and gospel performer and all-around unquenchable spirit -- had been filming the whole time, using a video camera she'd bought on the street for $20 and barely knew how to turn on.

I shouldn't spoil this movie for you, because I simply can't believe it won't come out of Sundance with a head of steam and a distribution deal in place. Let's just say that Kim Roberts' raw footage from the Ninth Ward captures a tale of thrilling human drama, terrible tragedy and unbelievable heroism among some of America's most stigmatized and downtrodden people -- and that Kim and Scott's post-Katrina story, as captured by Lessin and Deal, is even more amazing than that. No human being I can imagine could watch "Trouble the Water" and not be overwhelmed by grief and joy, and humbled by one's sudden awareness of one's own prejudices about the lives, passions and dreams of poor people. George W. Bush would weep buckets at this movie. (Maybe Dick Cheney wouldn't, but notice that I limited my target audience to human beings.)

When Kim (aka Black Kold Madina) finds the only surviving tape of her own music at a cousin's place in Memphis a few weeks after the storm, and launches into an impromptu performance of her song "Amazing" -- well, every show-biz cliché you can think of applies. The audience of film-industry professionals and affluent ticket-buying ski-resorters went apeshit, and not for the only time. Kim and Scott Roberts had flown to Utah for the premiere -- which may have been kind of dumb, considering that Kim is 38 weeks pregnant! -- and received an explosive, uproarious standing ovation after the film. We cried, we laughed, we cheered and we generally felt as if our insect exoskeletons had melted away, at least temporarily.

It's lovely that the Robertses are being treated as heroes here, because that's what they are. But Sundance is of course the ultimate high-end liberal enclave, and the issues raised in such effortless and moving fashion by "Trouble the Water" go far beyond one family's story of redemption, no matter how remarkable. Danny Glover, who helped produce the film, spoke eloquently afterwards about New Orleans as a place where "the global South meets the global North" and where a brief window of opportunity exists to do battle against a redevelopment model that's based on the tourist and service economies -- and on a policy of malign neglect toward neighborhoods where people like Scott and Kim Roberts live. Then we walked out of the Park City library into the falling snow, dried our tears and started to look for taxis and dinner reservations and warm places to wrestle with our souls.

[UPDATE:]

Breaking news from Park City! To ramp up the unlikely true-life human drama quotient of "Trouble the Water" still further, Kim Roberts, aka rapper Black Kold Madina, the 38-weeks-pregnant subject and star of the film, is pregnant no longer! She was driven through the snowstorm early on Monday morning and gave birth to a healthy baby girl in Salt Lake City at 6 a.m. (The vital statistics are seven pounds, one ounce.) Yes, that means that her daughter, presumably conceived in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans, was born on Martin Luther King Jr. Day in the nation's whitest and most conservative state. Really, what more can you say? Mother and daughter are reported to be fine and recovering comfortably.

NEW YORK MAGAZINE

January 22, 2008 – “Vulture: Katrina Survivors Score a Sundance Hit” by Logan Hill

…Two days before Katrina hit, small-time hustler, sometime drug dealer, and nonstop motormouth Kim Roberts bought a used video camera for twenty bucks. Then she filmed as she and her husband, Scott, helped 25 neighbors survive and escape the waters. Over the last two days in Park City, Utah, Roberts premiered their doc Trouble the Water to standing ovations — and gave birth to a seven-pound, one-ounce baby girl named Skyy. At an underwhelming Sundance (so far), she and her husband are the festival's most outrageous Cinderella story.

Directed by doc vets Tia Lessin and Carl Deal, the film relies heavily on the narrated footage Roberts shot inside the Ninth Ward as the hurricane destroyed everything they knew (Cloverfield's got nothing on this). Roberts interviewed locals who were too poor or incapacitated to leave (including one drug addict whose corpse she discovered during a return visit). She filmed the view from inside a swamped attic packed with women and found one real-life hero: a tall neighbor who rescued women and children on his floating punching bag. The film, which hasn't yet sold but will soon, is a devastating firsthand document and a potent indictment of bureaucratic negligence.

Kim and Scott Roberts are unrepentant hustlers who only survived Katrina by luck and street smarts (they appear to have escaped in a stolen truck). Kim's mother was a crack addict who died of AIDS-related complications; Scott is a former heroin addict who grew up fatherless in New Orleans housing projects. Both dealt drugs; both were nearly washed away by Katrina. Now both are trying to rebuild their lives — Carl as a carpenter, Kim as a rapper. We'll cover the film more when it opens, but for now, here's an exclusive clip from the movie, shot in the Ninth Ward, and a new track by Kim, a.k.a. Black Kold Madina, featured on the soundtrack.

LOS ANGELES TIMES

January 20, 2008 - "The eyes of the storm,” by Kenneth Turan – feature on ‘Trouble the Water’

PARK CITY, UTAH

SUNDANCE has always had a real "come-as-you-are" attitude, but its unlikely anyone has ever shown up as pregnant as Kim Roberts. "Nine months and two weeks and I still made it," she says with pride. She took the journey from New Orleans with her doctor's approval because "it's an opportunity for me to get the story out. I had to make it, by any means necessary."


Roberts, along with her husband, Scott, who also made the trip, are more than the central figures in "Trouble the Water." The stirring documentary about Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, directed by Tia Lessin and Carl Deal, debuted here Sunday. The harrowing home-movie footage Kim shot of the damage floodwaters did to her Lower 9th Ward home plays a prominent part in the doc and was strong enough to get filmmakers Lessin and Deal to change the film's focus.

The experienced co-directors, longtime associates of Michael Moore, went to Louisiana to make a film on the return of that state's National Guard from Iraq. But, Deal points out, "Michael Moore is always saying, 'You've got to forget what you think you know,' " with Lessin adding, "What happens on the ground is what you have to key into."

The filmmaking team weren't even planning to go to the Red Cross shelter in Alexandria, La. "It was like, 'Let's leave these people alone,' " Deal reports. But even before they parked their vehicle, Kim and Scott had spotted them. "I seen a whole bunch of people, a cameraman, a soundman, they looked important," Scott says. "I said to Kim, 'If we want to get that story out, these are the people to talk to.' "

And talk they did. "Trouble the Water" opens with a clip of an enthusiastic, charismatic Kim (who, like her husband, is a New Orleans native) telling the crew, "Nobody's got what I got." Although in one sense that footage did change the film's focus, in another, the filmmakers say, it didn't. "Our initial mission stayed intact," says Deal, with Lessin explaining, "The strength of the film was always going to be telling the story from the inside out."

Being a witness for the voiceless, impoverished and dispossessed is the role that Kim felt strongly enough about to make the trip to Utah. "I watched the coverage on TV and I said, 'They ain't telling the real stories. What happened to the real citizens of New Orleans?' I wanted to be a voice of the black community. We're speaking for everyone who stayed, everyone who suffered, everyone who died."

What's especially remarkable about the story of community resilience and government indifference that "Trouble the Water" tells is the coincidences it took to bring it to the screen, starting with Kim's $20 on-the-street purchase of a video camera a week before the hurricane hit. And if the Roberts' car hadn't been stolen three weeks before the storm, it's likely they would have left town before it hit.

But given that they were there, Kim decided "if that destruction comes, I want to be here to tell people we had a world. Once I realized I had to stay, I thought, 'If I die, I hope somebody finds this camera.' And once I captured what I captured, I thought, 'That has to be out there, that has to be on TV.' I ain't the only one; we're speaking for the majority of poor black people who ain't got no education, people who have to eat, have to buy Christmas toys to put under the tree, and that's just the truth."

Neither of the two shies away from the difficulties of their past, which at one point included selling drugs. "We're hustlers; we've done what we have to do to survive," Kim says. "I'm not proud of it, but I had to do what I had to do. I had mouths to feed, I had other people's children to take care of. Family has never been about blood relatives; it's about people who love us and we love back."

Those harsher days, however, are in the past.

Scott has a steady job in construction and they have started a label, Born Hustler Records, to record the rap music Kim does under the name Black Kold Madina. "Katrina gave us new life, a rebirth," Scott says. "We always had other talents, but we couldn't find a way to break through, to show the world we had other talents." Looking back, Kim says, "I'm glad I stayed for Katrina. It's one of the greatest things I ever did."

SLWEEKLY.COM

January 22, 2008 – “Sundance: More Black and White”

Trouble the Water – in which Tia Lessin and Carl Deal follow Hurricane Katrina survivors Kimberly Rivers and Scott Roberts for 18 months before, during and after the ordeal – proves to have at least a little more intriguing subtext. The “before” and “during” part is the real hook, as New Orleans Ninth Ward resident Rivers used her personal camcorder to chronicle her neighbors’ preparations, and their two days trapped in an attic before taking a boat to safety. The footage is undeniably gripping, and narrowing the impact of the disaster – both natural and bureaucratic – to these individuals provides a distinct perspective. But Trouble the Water actually proves more interesting as a portrait of community, including the band of survivors that becomes a makeshift family for Rivers and Roberts. The country may have let New Orleans down, but it brings a little lump to the throat watching the way those who lived there refused to let each other down. (Scott Renshaw)


PARK CITY RECORD

January 17, 2007 – “Filmmakers chase down one story, stumble onto another” by Nan Chalat Noaker

Some of the most memorable footage in this year's Sundance Film Festival may not have been shot with fancy equipment or by a professional filmmaker.

During the summer of 2005, Kimberly Rivers, a resident of the Ninth Ward in New Orleans, bought a video camera on the street for $10 and used it to record her struggle to survive Hurricane Katrina.

Rivers had never used a video camera before but knew her community was facing a disaster of historic proportions. In the hours leading up to the hurricane, and even as the floodwaters poured into her home, she trained it on her neighbors, saying to them at one point, "I am showing the world that we had a world here before the storm."

With a trembling hand on the camera, Rivers and her husband, Scott Roberts, to climb into a tiny crawl space under their roof to weather the storm. They also gather a few stragglers, offering them shelter, food and encouragement while the wind howls and their street becomes a raging river.

Compelling footage, definitely. But Rivers' journey from that crawl space to the Sundance Film Festival is equally amazing.

Watching the news coverage of Hurricane Katrina from their home in New York, veteran documentary filmmakers Tia Lessin and Carl Deal, who produced Michael Moore's film "Fahrenheit 9/11," felt compelled to get to New Orleans as quickly as possible.

According to Lessin, after experiencing the destruction of the World Trade Center they realized the best way to make sense of what was happening was to use their filmmaking skills.

"When Katrina came we were glued to our TVs. We were seething and upset and we wanted to do something," said Lessin.

Deal and Lessin decided to focus on the Louisiana National Guardsmen from New Orleans who were returning from Iraq only to find their own communities had been ruined by the hurricane.

"Many of those soldiers were going from one war zone to another," said Lessin.
In the process of covering that story, however, Lessin and Deal stumbled across Kimberly Rivers and Scott Roberts.

That chance encounter is where "Trouble the Water" begins.

As the filmmakers wrapped up with the soldiers, Deal decided to take a camera crew across the street to a large sports arena that was being used as a Red Cross center.

"Minutes after we arrived, Kim walks into the frame and essentially never left," Lessin remembers.
Rivers looks straight into Deal's also camera and says, "This needs to be worldwide nobody ain't got what I got."

"It was kind of magical. Their gift as storytellers was immediately apparent," said Lessin. "She knew it was a historic moment. She wanted it out there."

But Lessin and Deal recognized that the couples' saga didn't end when the flood waters receded. When Kimberly and Scott finally return to their street after the storm, the neighborhood is uninhabitable.

Slipping past police barricades under Lessin and Deal's journalist credentials, Rivers and Roberts are among the first 9th Ward residents to see the extent of the disaster. In the ensuing weeks, the filmmakers accompany Rivers, Roberts and other hurricane survivors as they navigate through a morass of red tape and overwhelmed relief agencies.

Lessin and Deal's footage shows that, essentially, many New Orleans residents were left to fend for themselves. And Rivers and Roberts's case is a heartwarming example of how families helped each other, even though, as Rivers says, "We had nothing left except our lives."

That is the story that Lessin and Deal follow with a professional film crew, but still very much under Rivers' influence. "She told us to 'keep it real,'" says Lessin, adding that some of the music in the film was composed and performed by Rivers who is revealed to be a talented hip-hop artist.

Along the way, Rivers and Roberts are uprooted again by Hurricane Rita and are shuffled from one aid agency to the next. In a particularly poignant scene, the two explain how they and fellow storm survivors were told to walk to a local decommissioned naval base for temporary shelter, only to be turned away, they say, at gunpoint.

Lessin and Deal said they worked hard to blend Rivers' footage with their own. As a result "Trouble the Water" tells a much bigger story than one couple's experience during Hurricane Katrina.

Ultimately, Deal thinks audiences will see their film as an "inspirational story of hope and survival."

"We believe this film can transform people," said Deal. "It is a very life-affirming film."

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