Award-winning Katrina documentary treks from New Orleans to Memphis : GoMemphis.com

I’m afraid that Hurricane Katrina ranks alongside the so-called War on Terror as a subject that weary Americans want to pretend to forget.

But “Trouble the Water” shouldn’t be missed. This documentary — inspired by the remarkable home-movie footage of Ninth Ward resident Kimberly Rivers Roberts, and partly shot in Memphis — is a tribute to human resilience and adaptability. The movie is certainly political (President Bush is shown muttering platitudes at the appropriately named El Mirage RV Resort and Country Club in Phoenix while the storm batters New Orleans), but it’s also existential: It chronicles a struggle to survive that transcends bureaucratic incompetence and speaks to the very nature of living in a hostile or at least indifferent and unknowable natural world, even in the 21st century.

Intimate and focused, “Trouble the Water” can be viewed as an unofficial companion piece to the epic and sprawling “When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts,” the 255-minute Spike Lee documentary that debuted on HBO. Lee’s angry film tried to be definitive, but “Trouble the Water,” directed by Tia Lessin and Carl Deal (producers of “Fahrenheit 9/11”), pretty much narrows the scope to Roberts — a former drug dealer and aspiring rapper whose mother died from AIDS — and her sometimes troubled husband, Scott. The Roberts’ sadly familiar “urban” life stories aren’t particularly relevant to the film, except for explaining, in part, why they were among those

who had no means of fleeing the desperate Ninth Ward as Katrina approached. “If I had wheels I’d be gone, too,” Kimberly Roberts says.

Lessin and Deal already were planning a Katrina film when they encountered Roberts, who brags of her video footage: “Nobody ain’t got what I got.” In fact, Roberts was correct: Her insider’s eyewitness account offers a compelling contrast to the sometimes laughable footage of professional TV news personalities reporting “live” from New Orleans while being battered by rain and blown off their feet.

As the storm approaches, Roberts wanders and bicycles around her neighborhood, talking to friends and children about their plans. She keeps herself the star of her footage: “It’s me, reporting live.” Says one little girl: “The hurricane is nothing but water — who’s scared of water?”

Roberts is charismatic and outgoing; her vocabulary is limited, but she’s extremely expressive. (Summing up the storm, Roberts reports: “Katrina, she’s a bad chick.”) She had no way of knowing her jumpy footage ever would be seen by anyone outside of her friends and family, but she keeps the camera rolling as the water creeps over her front porch and beyond, forcing her and her loved ones into an attic. “If I get some exciting (stuff), I can maybe sell it to the white folks,” she says, as the camera rolls. (Roberts gets one of two “director of photography” credits on the film, which won the Grand Jury Prize for documentary at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.)

After Roberts hooks up with Deal and Lessin, the professional — and extremely fortunate — filmmakers follow the husband and wife and another friend as they tour their destroyed neighborhood and eventually relocate to Memphis. When Roberts, who calls herself “Black Kold Madina,” expresses her reaction to the hurricane through an original rap, we witness a real-life equivalent of the moment when Terrence Howard’s DJay is revealed as a true artist in “Hustle & Flow.” Roberts’ proud post-Katrina self-appraisal is a slogan for America that shames anything heard on the current campaign trail: “Still here, still sane, still in the flesh, strong, healthy, looking for a better tomorrow.”

“Trouble the Water” opens Sept. 26 at Malco’s Ridgeway Four.

— John Beifuss, 529-2394