tagged w/ Trouble the Water
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Conversation with the filmmakers and stars of Trouble the Water, Winner of the 2008 Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize. A dramatic look into the real stories of New Orleans residents who battled Hurricane Katrina's deadly floodwaters, journeyed across post-disaster stumbling blocks, and seized a chance for a new beginning. Moderator: Judith Bell, President, PolicyLink Panelists include Danny Glover, Tia Lessin, Carl Deal, Kimberly Roberts, and Scott Roberts.Conversation with the filmmakers and stars of Trouble the Water, Winner of the 2008... more
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The theatrical trailer for the Sundance Grand Prize-winning documentary TROUBLE THE WATER. Directed and produced by Tia Lessin and Carl Deal and featuring Kimberly Rivers Roberts and Scott Roberts. Executive producers Joslyn Barnes and Danny Glover. Opens in New York and L.A. on August 22 with a nationwide release to follow. For more information visit http://www.troublethewaterfilm.comThe theatrical trailer for the Sundance Grand Prize-winning documentary TROUBLE THE... more
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Danny Glover on post-Katrina New Orleans and the new film "Trouble the water".
More information about "Trouble the Water" can be found at http://www.troublethewaterfilm.comDanny Glover on post-Katrina New Orleans and the new film "Trouble the... more
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Screening during the Republican National Convention, Tuesday, September 2nd at 11:00am at the Landmark Center in Saint Paul, Minnesota.
"Trouble the Water" is a documentary made by Tia Lessin and Carl Deal, a pair of professional filmmakers who worked with Michael Moore on "Fahrenheit 9/11," and like other documentaries it's a movie about real people and their lives, designed to enlighten and entertain in roughly equal measure. You could say that all documentary films represent a collaboration between director and subject, but in "Trouble the Water" that collaboration is stretched nearly to the breaking point, since the heart of the film is footage Lessin and Deal didn't shoot.
As they would be the first to admit, "Trouble the Water" only exists because Kimberly Rivers Roberts, a charismatic, trash-talking "street hustler" (her words) and aspiring rapper from the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans, turned on her new Sony camcorder -- she'd bought it on the street for $20, provenance unknown -- on Aug. 29, 2005, and began to shoot what was happening in her neighborhood. What was happening, in case you've forgotten, was that a big hurricane passed over New Orleans, the city's levees were breached in many places, and the water on Roberts' street rose past the stop signs and nearly to the housetops.
If possible, Roberts' movie-within-a-movie is even more amazing than it sounds. She captures a tale of courage, heroism and tragedy more thrilling than any Hollywood spectacle; one neighbor, a man Roberts and her husband, Scott, hadn't even liked before the hurricane, risks his life to save them, swimming back and forth across the street using a punching bag as a flotation device. Roberts barely knew how to turn the camera on when the storm started, and her footage is highly uneven. But you can feel her taking ownership of the situation as the catastrophe worsens, doing her own TV-news-style voice- over and alternating between establishing shots and close-ups.
What Lessin and Deal provide is a considered structure that places Roberts' footage within a larger social and emotional context as part of a self-defined life, in which Hurricane Katrina was both tragedy and opportunity. As Roberts makes clear, she's a former drug dealer who lived by her wits in one of the poorest, blackest neighborhoods in the United States. But no person can be reduced to her pathologies, and she's also a married woman with a tremendously likable and loving husband and a supportive extended family, some of them much more affluent. All those resources helped her in her remarkable odyssey out of the flooded Ninth Ward to a Red Cross shelter, where she approached the two white filmmakers from New York (who had been turned away by the National Guard) with the words, "This needs to be worldwide. Ain't nobody got what I got."*continues*Screening during the Republican National Convention, Tuesday, September 2nd at 11:00am... more
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Grand Jury Prize for best film drama: "Frozen River"
Best documentary: "Trouble the Water"Grand Jury Prize for best film drama: "Frozen River"
Best documentary:... more
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