Hurricane Katrina made landfall 20 years ago this week, and with that grim anniversary come multiple television events looking back at the storm’s devastation and aftermath, especially in New Orleans. Notable among them is the limited documentary series “Katrina: Come Hell and High Water,” now on Netflix.
Each of its three episodes is directed by a different filmmaker. Each is emotional and precisely rendered. But the third is what really sets this series apart, directed by Spike Lee, who was responsible for the groundbreaking 2006 docuseries “When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts.” With new insights and material drawn from the nearly two decades since, Lee returns to New Orleans with sorrow, rage and irreverence to paint a portrait of how deeply the community has been failed.
The first two parts of “Come Hell and High Water” are smartly told accounts of the tragedy. The first, from Geeta Gandbhir (“The Perfect Neighbor”), chronicles the systematic failures that left people stranded when the storm arrived. The second is by Samantha Knowles (“Black and Missing”), which looks at what unfolded after the levees gave way, homing in specifically on the racist, false narrative that New Orleans was overrun by violent crimes committed by Black people. (Many of the most lurid reports from the time were exaggerated or untrue; in fact, many heinous crimes were committed against Black people by white people.)
There’s a tonal shift that follows when Lee takes over. He book-ends his section — titled “God Takes Care of Fools and Babies” — with bracing spoken word poems from two survivors. And there is a pain and fury that courses through the nearly 90 minutes. Lee refuses to offer a trite statement about the resilience of the community, though there is resilience present. Instead, he seems more interested in what remains lost since the flood, particularly the lasting exodus of New Orleans’s Black population and the decimation of the city’s education system.
Lee, whose voice you can hear throughout the interviews, emphasizes certain words spoken by his subjects by superimposing them on the screen in big block letters. Occasionally the text is used for flashes of humor. Often it is meant to enrage, a searing reminder of the human error, neglect and outright violence that cost so many people their lives and livelihoods.
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