A man standing in a hurricane-ravaged street in New Orleans talks to two soldiers. He thanks them for having helped remove the decomposing body of a relative killed by the storm. "We thank you all for being in the city of New Orleans ... I pray you don't have to go back to Iraq. It's not our war," says Scott Roberts. "This is the war right here."
This is one of the many striking moments in the acclaimed documentary "Trouble the Water," which screens Wednesday, Nov. 5 at 7 p.m. at UWM's Union Theatre, 2200 E. Kenwood Blvd., on the second floor of the Student Union.
You've seen the news footage, you've read the newspapers commentaries. But "Trouble the Water" -- which won the Grandy Jury Prize at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival -- is a 93-minute look at the coming of the storm, the amazing fury of Hurricane Katrina itself and the aftermath.
Directors Carl Deal ad Tia Lessin follow aspiring rapper Kimberly Rivers Roberts as she films everything with her hand-held video camera. The result is a frontline look at the devastation in the city's 9th Ward.
Another striking moment: "No offense to civilian people," says one National Guardsman in New Orleans, "but they have no idea how to survive."
While that might be true of some, it certainly was true of one 9th Warder called "Larry."
During the storm, there is water that reaches nearly to the word STOP on the traffic sign at the corner, but Larry refuses to surrender. Two by two, he rescues his neighbors by floating from house to house with a boxer's punching bag.
Deal and Lessin began making the film two weeks after Katrina struck.
"People ask us how we found Kimberly and Scott," says Lessin, "the truth is that they found us.
"We were stunned by the televised images of elderly people laid out on baggage claim carousels at the airport, and bloated bodies floating where streets had been. We wanted to know why the city had not been evacuated before the story, and why was it that help was so late in coming after the levees collapsed. We wanted to make sense of it all."
When the filmmakers met Kimberly Rivers Roberts, she told them, " See how you're doing (pointing to the camera), I was doing that. When you wanna get with me and look at the tape?"
Her tape brought the terrible force of the storm to video and her footage is some of the most powerful in the documentary. But where "Trouble the Water" really succeeds is in putting a human face on a tragedy that we all witnessed unfold on our TV screens. Here we get to see the faces of the people who witnessed it first-hand.
At the start of the film, as the storm is on the horizon, Roberts predicts, "This is going to be a day to remember." But even she clearly had no idea.
Admission to the UWM screening is free and open to all.
Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., where he lived until he was 17, Bobby received his BA-Mass Communications from UWM in 1989 and has lived in Walker's Point, Bay View, Enderis Park, South Milwaukee and on the East Side.
He has published three non-fiction books in Italy – including one about an event in Milwaukee history, which was published in the U.S. in autumn 2010. Four more books, all about Milwaukee, have been published by The History Press.
With his most recent band, The Yell Leaders, Bobby released four LPs and had a songs featured in episodes of TV's "Party of Five" and "Dawson's Creek," and films in Japan, South America and the U.S. The Yell Leaders were named the best unsigned band in their region by VH-1 as part of its Rock Across America 1998 Tour. Most recently, the band contributed tracks to a UK vinyl/CD tribute to the Redskins and collaborated on a track with Italian novelist Enrico Remmert.
He's produced three installments of the "OMCD" series of local music compilations for OnMilwaukee.com and in 2007 produced a CD of Italian music and poetry.
In 2005, he was awarded the City of Asti's (Italy) Journalism Prize for his work focusing on that area. He has also won awards from the Milwaukee Press Club.
He has be heard on 88Nine Radio Milwaukee talking about his "Urban Spelunking" series of stories, in that station's most popular podcast.
