Article on it from 2006.
Images are what make films, and no footage shot in the past year could have provided more powerful imagery than that of Hurricane Katrina, which destroyed lives from Florida to Louisiana to Mississippi.
Spike Lee's epic and complicated documentary, "When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts," poignantly weaves reams of astonishing footage into a complex, heartfelt examination of the fate of both a city and the nation that seemed to stand by as it was swallowed by the sea.
That it has taken the one-year anniversary of Katrina to bring the nation's worst natural disaster — one that went largely unabated by governmental relief — back into our collective consciousness says a lot. Lee doesn't beat this message into our heads, something he has been criticized for in the past. Instead, the director allows the people who lived through the disaster to tell their stories. The film follows dozens of them through the course of the past year as they recall what they endured — and survived — in their own words.
The four-hour documentary will air in its entirety at 8 p.m. Aug. 29, Katrina's actual anniversary.
Among those featured is New Orleans native Herbert Freeman Jr., whose mother died next to him as they sat stranded for days at the Superdome. He was told to leave her in the dome with a pile of other deceased people and a hand-scribbled note. Several days later, he says, when trying to go to say goodbye to her before being evacuated, a National Guardsman pointed a machine gun in his face and told him he had to get on a bus immediately.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/08/22/opinion/main1923876.shtml
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