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Trouble the Water
"There is by now a rich, eventhough unheralded subgenre of independent films - shorts and features, ranging from avant-garde tone poem to verite docudrama - dealing with Katrina and its aftermath," writes Dennis Lim, introducing an overview of that subgenre in the New York Times. "Trouble the Water, which won the grand jury prize for best documentary at the Sundance Film Festival and opens on Friday, is one of the best evaluated of these movies. It is also perhaps the one that most shrewdly navigates a problem that to some extent bedevils all filmmakers who take on this fraught subject: how to reconcile their outsider perspectives with the experiences of those who lived through the hurricane. The decision to give pride of place to [Kimberly] Roberts''s raw first-person footage and to grant the Robertses a guiding role in the documentary was both generous and astute, a way for [Carl] Deal and [Tia] Lessin to avoid telling too much of the story across the divides of race and class."
Updated through 8/21.
Posted by: dwhudson
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