From the Eye of the Storm
Co-stars of "Trouble the Water" discuss Sundance and New Orleans.
Feb. 1, 2008— -- For Americans tuning in to see Louisiana's levees break, Hurricane Katrina may not have seemed real. But as New Orleans natives Kimberly and Scott Roberts watched the waters rushing into their home in the Lower Ninth Ward, it was all too real.
Kimberly and Scott could not possibly know then that Hurricane Katrina would crush their city, leaving almost 2,000 people dead and millions displaced, but they knew they had to capture what they were seeing.
Kimberly grabbed her Sony Hi-8 camcorder, the camera that she had bought on the street for $20 the week before the storm. That snap decision resulted in the documentary "Trouble the Water," the winner of the 2008 Sundance Film Festival's Grand Jury Prize for a Documentary.
Peter Travers caught up with the couple for an interview for ABC News Now's "Popcorn."
Kimberly's decision to film the storm came more as an impulse than a calculated idea: She says, "I grabbed my camera and I was like, 'I've got to film this!'"
She laughs now, saying, "I had to be inspired by God or something. Because I look at it now and I'm like, 'Dang I didn't cut the camera off?' I felt like it was seeing history being made."
The couple remembers being unsure of whether or not they would survive. But if they did, they wanted the world to witness what they had seen.
"I didn't think anybody was going to believe me -- so I just kept filming," Kimberly says.
Even from this earliest moment, she knew her story would affect others.
"I tried to get as much as I can on tape to really prove to my family, 'Hey, if we made it through this, man, you can make it through a lot of things,'" she says.
"Trouble the Water" takes viewers through the hours preceding the storm and the following days as a community struggles to rebuild itself after total destruction. The couple managed to save more than 25 people in their community, prompting many to label them heroes. But the couple explains that the video simply portrays them doing "what good Samaritans are supposed to do."
