the levees

Spike Lee's four-act Hurricane Katrina documentary, "When the Levees Broke," is a work of anger and rage. Those raw emotions give the film a voice, a perspective that marks the film a product of one particular moment in time. The anger expressed by the documentary's talking heads - politicians, activists, relief workers, citizens of the gulf coast - dates the film. 2006. One year after Katrina.

Much the same way that Lee's "Do the Right Thing" drips with its historical context. New York. Late 1980s. References to Tawana Brawley, popular hip hop artists of the time, and so forth.

"When the Levees Broke" features exhaustive and heartbreaking footage of Katrina and its aftermath. Lee's camera work overwhelms and compels. At times sweeping shots of flood waters and devastation but mostly Lee emphasizes the human, introducing us to folks with unforgettable stories.

And while those stories stick with us, so too do the systemic failures that resulted in all of those deaths. Just over a year later and how easy it is to forget about the armed white militias keeping the displaced black New Orleans residents from crossing the bridges into their white parishes. A few months after the release of the reports and how easy it is to forget about the gross neglience of the Army Corps of Engineers. Easy to forget about Condoleeza Rice shoe shopping and taking in a showing of Spamalot and George W. Bush rolling out Iraq soundbites in southern California while the levees were giving way. We meet the Mississippi resident who tells Dick Cheney to go fuck himself at a press conference. Turns out the resident was trying to get to his home after the evacuation but was blocked by Cheney's motorcade. We see Barbara Bush touring a crowded, dirty, Houston arena full of displaced New Orleans residents and suggesting that they were poor anyway and were probably better off here.

And the documentary reminds us that forgetting is a luxury. We forget about the systemic failures and the root injustices that caused so many deaths because we have the luxury to move on. Not everyone has that luxury, and the human faces we meet are faces that remember. One Katrina survivor's respond to Barbara Bush: "I was poor. Everything I got I got it honest. You was rich. How did you get there?"