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Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival Forum Will Screen And Discuss Award-Winning Documentary On Hurricane Katrina And Its Aftermath

ITHACA, NY — The Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival (FLEFF), in collaboration with Cinemapolis, will present a screening and discussion of “Trouble the Water” on Saturday, Dec. 6. The screening will begin at Cinemapolis, 171 State St. in Ithaca, at 7 p.m., with a discussion to follow. FLEFF co-directors and Ithaca College faculty members Thomas Shevory and Patricia Zimmermann will focus on the politics and aesthetics of the film. Tickets may be purchased at the door for $8.50 on a first-come, first-served basis.

Directed and produced by Tia Lessin and Carl Deal, who also produced “Fahrenheit 9/11” and “Bowling for Columbine,” “Trouble the Water” has something few other documentaries or news reports about Hurricane Katrina can offer: footage shot by a New Orleans resident just before, during, and after the storm. Kim Roberts, an aspiring rap artist, and her streetwise husband Scott, find themselves in New Orleans the day before Katrina makes landfall.

“It’s going to be a day to remember,” Roberts says excitedly as she turns her video camera on herself and her 9th Ward neighbors. Roberts’s playful tone is a stark contrast to the audience’s knowledge that hell is just hours away.

As the hurricane begins to rage and floodwaters fill the screen, Roberts continues to film, documenting her and her husband’s harrowing voyage to higher ground and the dramatic rescues of friends and neighbors.

Two weeks after the storm, Lessin and Deal met Kim and Scott Roberts while working on a separate film and decided to take their own footage of the Robertses waiting for government assistance and attempting to put their lives back together.

“Intertwining Kim and Scott’s powerful video with a mix of verité and in-your-face filmmaking, Deal and Lessin follow the Roberts’ story through the storm and its aftermath and into a new life,” Zimmermann said.

“This film is a redemptive tale of self-described street hustlers whose heroic tale of survival takes viewers inside Hurricane Katrina in a way never before seen on screen,” Shevory added.

"Trouble the Water" has garnered numerous awards, including the Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival.

Launched in 1997 as an outreach project sponsored by Ithaca College, Cornell University’s Center for the Environment and Eunadi Center for International Studies and others, FLEFF is now under the auspices of the Ithaca College Division of Interdisciplinary and International Studies. FLEFF has become a major regional event in upstate New York and enjoys an international reputation as a cutting-edge, multi-arts program.

For more information on the forum, contact Patricia Zimmermann at (607) 274-3431. For more information on the film visit www.troublethewaterfilm.com.