The New York Times comments on “Trouble the Water” in the Sunday edition here. The Katrina Experience organized by the Full Frame Festival and IndiePix is a powerful collection of 8 documentary films from the 2006 Full Frame Festival that need to be mentioned along with the NYT article. Here (below) is our letter to the editors of the arts section …
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The commentary on Tia Lessin and Carl Deal’s film, “Trouble The Water”, is a welcome light on this important, Sundance Award winning film. There is a rich collection of independent films that provide a visual record of this devastating event, a record that corrects the major errors in tone and substance in broadcast television reporting at the time, as well as gaps in coverage that stem from the simple neglect of stories from those days that need to be understood. This film is a strong addition.

Some films, such as “Desert Bayou” (focusing on the several hundred New Orleans families relocated to Salt Lake City, exposing the deep fissures of race in America) directed by Alex LeMay, showcased at MOMA and has had some theatrical exposure. Others — such as “Tim’s Island” (a real world survival story of 16 people, 7 dogs and 8 cats who wait out the storm and the rising waters in a warehouse, recorded live) by Lazlo Fulop and Wickes Helmboldt; or “New Orleans Music In Exile” (focusing on the dislocation of that City’s legendary music community) by Robert Mugge — have had significant festival exposure and are now available on DVD, either as consumer discs or in a collection for libraries and educational institutions.

IndiePix is proud to have brought these films, as well as four extraordinarily powerful, award winning short films by prominent independent film directors, to the public record. Working with the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival (a festival sponsored in part by Duke University and this newspaper), we have organized a collection entitled “The Katrina Experience” available to public and private libraries around the country. We are now working with directors Ed Pincus and Lucia Small and The Cinema Guild to bring “Axe in the Attic” first

to libraries and then later through IndiePix to the consumer market.

The belief in “the industry” that these films are “noncommerical” is typical of the overemphasis on the theatrical market that neglects the lives these films have in the collections of individuals and libraries around the country. By releasing and distributing these titles to those buyers, we ensure that the public record is rich with the experience of people who lived with the event and its consequences.

The Katrina event — and the near total loss of an important American city — expands in our consciousness every year. A vital public record, including these films, is now and increasingly will be, essential to a deeper understanding of what “Katrina” means to us.