Spike Lee's Katrina 'Requiem' Mixes Anger, Sorrow

Aug. 18, 2006 — -- Spike Lee wants the world to see what happened to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina -- but not his children, not yet anyway.

The 40-year-old director was in Venice a year ago when the hurricane devastated the Gulf Coast. As he watched the tragedy unfold on TV, he called home to New York and agreed with his wife that the devastation was just too much for his 8- and 10-year-old children to watch.

A year later, Lee still believes his kids are too young for the heart-rending details, and so they won't be watching "When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts." The documentary airs on HBO Monday and Tuesday nights, and will be repeated Aug. 29 to mark the one-year anniversary of Katrina's landfall.

At a special screening in New Orleans earlier this week, the normally brash Lee was uncharacteristically skittish about showing the film to survivors. A woman whose 5-year-old daughter drowned in the flood told him that she was driving in from Fort Worth, Texas. A man whose son died in a wheelchair at the city's convention center said he was coming from Alabama.

"I told them not to come," said Lee. "This is not going to be easy."

It was quite an uncharacteristic move for a director who has always relished using his art to provoke. He confronted simmering race relations head-on in 1989's "Do the Right Thing," and it's a theme that's pervaded many of his films.

But in many ways, "Requiem" is at least as hard-hitting as any of his other work, taking a hard look at why much of the city's poor and black population did not evacuate ahead of the storm, and why rescue efforts seemed to take so long.

"The devastation here was not brought on solely by Mother Nature," Lee said. "People in charge were not doing their job."

Lee has called the slow response to Katrina "a criminal act," although he's not directly singling out local, state or federal officials. Over the past year, he's interviewed dozens of victims, rescue workers and officials, including Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin.