Spike Lee's film about America's horrific and criminal failure to respond to Katrina -- When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts -- will debut on HBO in time for the Katrina anniversary (Aug. 29). The first two hours of the four hour film will premiere at the New Orleans Arena on August 16, 2006.
New York Times:
NEW ORLEANS — From the beginning Spike Lee knew that Hurricane Katrina was a story he had to tell. Watching the first television images of floating bodies and of desperate people, mostly black, stranded on rooftops, he quickly realized he was witnessing a major historical moment. As those moments kept coming, he spent almost a year capturing the hurricane’s sorrowful consequences for a four-hour documentary, “When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts,” to be shown on HBO this month. . .
Mr. Lee’s reputation helped get his camera crew into the city’s water-soaked homes, he said. It allowed him to stretch out a complex story, with themes of race, class and politics that, he said, have too often been sensationalized or rendered in sound bites. He received permission, for example, from Kimberly Polk to film the funeral of her 5-year-old daughter, Sarena Polk, swept away when the waters ravaged the Lower Ninth Ward. “She came to me in a dream,” Ms. Polk says in the film. “She said, ‘Mama, I’m falling.’” . . .
“Levees” opens with the Louis Armstrong song “Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?” and offers black-and-white images of the city’s Southern-with-a-twist past — Mardi Gras, Confederate flags — interspersed with scenes of children airlifted from demolished houses, a door marked “dead body inside.” . . .
HBO is to show the first two hours of “Levees” on Aug. 21 at 9 p.m., the last two on Aug. 22 at 9 p.m. It will be shown in its entirety at 8 p.m. on Aug. 29, the anniversary of the hurricane, one of the country’s worst natural disasters.
After you put away the popcorn, the real live Katrina tragedy continues:
"Gutting a Katrina house -- which costs at least $6,000 if you have to pay for it -- is the first step toward rebuilding it. Homeowners who haven't taken that first step by Aug. 29, the hurricane's looming first anniversary, face the prospect that the city may order their flood-damaged house bulldozed."
Spike Lee Katrina Race Poverty Bush Brownie FEMA Michael Brown New Orleans Race Republican Scandal Racism
