Sunday, September 20, 2009 5:00pm Eastern

Trouble the Water

Chat with Producers/Directors, Tia Lessin and Carl Deal, about their 2009 Academy Award Nominated documentary. Hosted by Lisa Derrick at FDL, 5pm ET.

TROUBLE THE WATER takes you inside Hurricane Katrina in a way never before seen on screen. It’s a redemptive tale of two self-described street hustlers who become heroes-two unforgettable people who survive the storm and then seize a chance for a new beginning.

The film opens the day before the storm makes landfall-twenty-four year old aspiring rap artist Kimberly Rivers Roberts is turning her new video camera on herself and her 9th Ward neighbors trapped in the city. "It’s going to be a day to remember," Kim declares. With no means to leave the city and equipped with just a few supplies and her hi 8 camera, she and her husband Scott tape their harrowing ordeal as the storm rages, the nearby levee breaches, and floodwaters fill their home and their community.

Seamlessly weaving 15 minutes of this home movie footage shot the day before and the day of the storm, with archival news segments and verite footage shot over two years, directors Tia Lessin and Carl Deal document a journey of remarkable people surviving not only failed levees, bungling bureaucrats and armed soldiers, but also their own past.

Tia Lessin and Carl Deal are the producers and directors of 2009 Academy Award ® nominated feature documentary Trouble the Water, winner of the Gotham Independent Film Award and the Sundance Film Festival’s Grand Jury Prize. They were also producers of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, winner of the Palme d’Or, and of Academy Award ®-winning Bowling for Columbine.

Tia received the Sidney Hillman Prize for Broadcast Journalism for her documentary short Behind the Labels. She line produced Martin Scorsese’s No Direction Home: Bob Dylan and was associate producer of Charles Guggenheim’s Oscar-nominated film Shadows of Hate.

Carl Deal was the Archival Producer for Fahrenheit 9/11 and Bowling for Columbine, and John Pilger’s recent The War on Democracy, and has contributed to many other documentaries on television and in the cinema, including Sundance favorites God Grew Tired of Us and My Kid Could Paint That. (http://www.troublethewaterfilm.com/)