Trouble the Water / People around the world watched in horror during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in August 2005, but there was, at first, a surreal, disjointed feeling that came from the footage of a weeping Anderson Cooper, a weather-beaten Sean Penn attempting to rescue people in a leaky dinghy and an unscripted Kanye West. As the days progressed and the situation escalated while FEMA and the federal government fiddled, emotions went from disbelief to shock and ire. How could a major U.S. city find itself underwater, and its citizens abandoned and turned into refugees?

Spike Lee’s magnum opus When the Levees Broke, with its four-hour investigation into the aftermath of Katrina, did an astounding job of detailing the lives of New Orleans’ citizens, and if you haven’t seen it, you need to. But his film is all after-effect, with talking heads and haunting images. He fails to bring the sense of what it was like as it was happening. For that, we have the Oscar-nominated documentary Trouble the Water.

An early shot shows filmmakers Tia Lessin and Carl Deal, working on a different kind of movie about New Orleans, when Kimberly Roberts and her husband Scott interrupt them, demanding that they be interviewed as well. “This needs to be world-wide,” Kimberly says, “’cause all the footage I seen on TV, ain’t nobody got what I got.”

That’s an understatement if there ever was one. Taking a handheld camera purchased of the street, she swings her camera wildly around the residents of the 9th Ward, all preparing to bunker down for the onslaught of the coming storm. Mayor Ray Nagin is shown 19 hours before Katrina made landfall, ordering a mandatory evacuation, yet failing to provide any means of public transportation, leaving the poorest people behind. The Roberts were among those people.

The storm hits, and Kimberly narrates as the waters rise, forcing her family into the attic, trapped by the water below and unable to break through to the rooftop. There’s a call to 911, only to be told there are no rescue teams or emergency units responding, “at this time.”

They are rescued, however, by another citizen of the 9th Ward who uses a punching bag as a floatation device to bring people out, two at a time, to a boat that he found floating among the debris. And still, the story continues, as the Roberts and their new friends try to find shelter at an old abandoned naval area and are turned away at gunpoint.

They return three weeks after the devastation and find her uncle’s decomposing body, still inside. Kimberly discovers her grandmother perished in a hospital where the patients weren’t evacuated. She uses her long-delayed FEMA money to bail out her brother so he can attend the funeral, and he tells of the inmates being abandoned, left to fend for themselves, while still trapped inside.

But Trouble the Water, with its unblinking eye on the devastation and hardship manages to stay out of maudlin territory, and that’s all because of Kimberly, an aspiring rapper who uses the stage name Black Kold Madina. Like Oscar favorite Man on Wire, you can’t help but be enamored with the subject and how she presents her own story. It’s not self-promotion, and she’s not a filmmaker—she almost seems to forget there’s a camera present at some moments, and much of the footage is out of focus, a cacophony of noise and voices, sometimes to an undecipherable degree. But throughout it all, the self-described street hustler shows compassion, humor and hope. She brings empathy to the subjects she films. She finds simple joy in discovering that a relative in Memphis has her demo tape, which she figured was lost in the flood and then plays the track, “Amazing” reciting her life story, detailing everything from her mother dying at 13 from AIDS, drug addiction and domestic abuse (with her providing the abuse), with the chorus detailing her faith, her spirit and her tenacity.

“I don’t need you to tell me that I’m amazing,” she raps directly to the camera.

We’ll say it anyway. She is. She truly is.

Trouble the Water plays at Doris Duke Theatre Wed 2/4 & Thu 2/5, 1 & 7:30pm, 532-8700.