"Never awake me when you have good news to announce, because with good news nothing presses; but when you have bad news, arouse me immediately, for then there is not an instant to be lost."

          -- Napoleon Bonaparte

They love the Little Corporal in New Orleans, despite the fact that he sold their wondrously unique Creole universe to the Americans in 1803 for the modern day equivalent of a six-pack of Natty Light and a used Katy Perry CD. At the corner of Rues Chartres and St. Louis in the French Quarter there is a building that, upon Napoleon's exile to St. Helena, was said to have been augmented to include living quarters for the former emperor upon his Creole-assisted escape. (It is worth nothing that New Orleanians have perennially been trying to bust people out of somewhere or other since the first French tents were pitched along the Mississippi in 1718, and would have done so again had Napoleon not been so rude as to die before they could make the effort.)

The legend may or may not be true. His death mask is kicking around town some place, that's for sure. And when the flood waters that followed the levee failures in New Orleans began to rise four years ago, his maxim about bad news was spot on. Time got pretty tricky for those left behind.

Such is the premise of the Oscar-nominated documentary Trouble the Water, a film by Tia Lessin and Carl Deal which builds on raw footage shot by Kimberly and Scott Roberts in and around their Ninth Ward home before, during, and after Hurricane Katrina made land (I'll let you decide if that's a "right place, right time" scenario). The good folks at FLEFF screened the film this past spring, but tonight Lessin and Deal themselves will be showing Trouble -- 7:30 p.m. in Emerson Suites -- and will respond to your Q's with their A's afterward.

As it happens, I just got back from New Orleans last week, and while considerable progress has been made it should be pointed out that a significant portion of a major American city still looks like a bad day in Bosnia four years after lousy weather, dodgy engineering practices, and the sort of infrastructural shortcuts bean counters adore conspired to drown it. New Orleans still needs help -- lots of help -- and Trouble the Water goes a long way toward illustrating why these problems linger.

Plenty of Ithacans have been involved with recovery efforts in southern Louisiana and the Gulf Coast in the past four years, whether spending an alternative spring break building homes with Habitat for Humanity, working in the hard-hit Seventh Ward with local samaritans Love Knows No Bounds, taking in displaced pets and college students alike, and (for the construction-hapless like myself) spending every last vacation day gorging on beignets and gumbo ya-ya in New Orleans. Trouble the Water offers a sometimes inspiring, often enraging portrait of one community's near destruction, the tireless efforts of locals and visitors from around the world to save it, and the appalling confederacy of government failure, embedded racism, and insurance company greed that actually managed to make things worse -- which is saying something when the starting point was a city 80% under water.

Check it out and let us know what you think. It's not every day the most unique city in America is threatened with extinction, and thus not every filmmaker who happens to capture that horror first-hand. Maybe you'll be inspired to visit and help the recovery process, or at least grab a muffuletta at Napoleon House Cafe, served hot...just the way Bonaparte liked 'em.