The documentary is based on news video footage and still photos of Katrina and its aftermath, interspersed with interviews. Interviewees include politicians, journalists, historians, engineers, and many residents of various parts of New Orleans and the surrounding areas, who give first hand accounts of their experiences with the levee failures and the aftermath.
In the style of Michael Apted's Up series (a documentary series that interviews Apted's subjects every seven years), Lee planned to interview his featured subjects in Levees at least once more.[3] In August 2010, HBO aired Lee's documentary series, If God Is Willing and Da Creek Don't Rise, which chronicles how New Orleans and the Gulf Coast area have fared in the five years following Hurricane Katrina.
Synopsis
The film focuses on the changed lives of New Orleans residents after Hurricane Katrina hit. The film shows residents in the midst of disaster dealing with death, devastation and disease. Spike Lee said about the film:
New Orleans is fighting for its life. These are not people who will disappear quietly — they're accustomed to hardship and slights, and they'll fight for New Orleans. This film will showcase the struggle for New Orleans by focusing on the profound loss, as well as the indomitable spirit of New Orleaneans.[4]
This documentary is Spike Lee's third, preceded by 4 Little Girls (1997), about the Birmingham church bombing of 1963; and Jim Brown: All-American (2002), about the football player.
Shooting for the film began three months after Hurricane Katrina hit, when Lee and his camera crew took the first of eight trips to New Orleans. They conducted interviews and taped footage for the film. Lee hoped to hear varying opinions of the storm and responses to the storm's destruction. He interviewed nearly 100 people of diverse backgrounds and opinions for his film.
The film's original score is by Terence Blanchard, a New Orleans-born trumpeter who appears in the film, with his mother and aunt, as they return to their flooded home. Not being the first time that Terence Blanchard had worked as a composer for a film by Spike Lee, Blanchard had worked to create compositions of a more universal genre of jazz as opposed to New Orleans style jazz in order to reach masses of audiences to raise awareness of the results of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. In general, the music he had composed was written under the context of respecting those who were directly affected by the catastrophe and with intentions of providing contexts to allow audiences to sympathize with those affected.[6]
Awards
When the Levees Broke won three Emmy Awards: Exceptional Merit in Nonfiction Filmmaking, Outstanding Directing for Nonfiction Programming, and Outstanding Picture Editing for Nonfiction Programming.
It received a 2006 Peabody Award from the University of Georgia for being an "epic document of destruction and broken promises and a profound work of art" and "an uncompromising analysis of the events that precede and follow Hurricane Katrina's assault on New Orleans" that "tells the story with an unparalleled diversity of voices and sources."[7]
The film focuses on the suffering of those affected by the disaster and their will to survive. Additionally, it suggests that the disaster in New Orleans was preventable, caused by levees poorly designed by the United States Army Corps of Engineers, and the suffering afterward was compounded by failures at all levels of government, most severely at the State level. These points are in line with mainstream investigations, including the bipartisan U.S. Congressional report, A Failure of Initiative, and the Army Corps of Engineers' own studies.[8][9][10][11][12][13]
