Hurricane Katrina survivor Kimberly Rivers Roberts, left, holds a family photo she saved from the flood, while husband Scott Roberts looks on. The Roberts are the focus of the Oscar-nominated documentary Trouble the Water. (Elsewhere Films)

Two weeks after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in August 2005, a ballsy rap artist and her sweetly smiling husband came up to a pair of filmmakers and handed them gold. The rapper, Kimberly Rivers Roberts, and her husband, Scott, had not only survived the storm where it hit hardest – the city’s impoverished Lower Ninth Ward – but Kim had shot video footage of their terrifying experience.

Kimberly Rivers Roberts and her husband, Scott, not only survived Hurricane Katrina where it hit hardest, but they had shot video footage of their terrifying experience.

That video forms the backbone of the Oscar-nominated documentary Trouble the Water, a stunning close-up portrait of Katrina and the lives it tore asunder. But the Roberts’ harrowing home movie was only part of their gift. As filmmakers Tia Lessin and Carl Deal discovered, the engaging young couple were a great story themselves. Natives of the poorest district in New Orleans, their resilience in the face of the hurricane ran contrary to the media images of looters and helpless victims that emerged during the post-Katrina coverage.

When Lessin and Deal first encountered them, the Roberts were destitute but defiantly upbeat as they coped with the staggering loss of their home, their community and their loved ones. By the time this remarkable film is over, we have seen the pair – who had previously dabbled in drug dealing and petty crime – turn the upheaval of Katrina into an opportunity to reconsider and remake their lives.

“It’s a very life-affirming story,” says the New York-based Deal, on his cellphone from Washington, D.C., where the film recently screened at a fundraiser for New Orleans community organizations. When he and Lessin met the Roberts, “they were talking a lot about personal transformation and about looking for a second chance," Deal said. "We were struck by their optimism and their honesty. They were people we immediately wanted to spend time with.”

Lessin and Deal, seasoned documentarians who had previously worked together on Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/11, had gone down to New Orleans with a different story in mind. When Katrina struck, Louisiana’s National Guard was posted in Iraq, and Lessin and Deal had planned to capture the soldiers on their return to the flooded city. “We thought that would be an interesting angle,” Deal says, “a way of talking about how the allocation of hundreds of billions of dollars to the war on terror has had a real effect on people at home.”

Trouble the Water filmmakers Carl Deal, left, and Tia Lessin. (Elsewhere Films)

The National Guard, however, denied them access just as they began filming. While Lessin met with the brass to try to get the ban lifted, Deal wandered over to a Red Cross shelter and was approached by the Roberts. Kim knew that what she’d shot was unique and she wanted the whole nation to see it. As she tells Deal confidently in the film’s opening scene, “Nobody ain’t got what I got.”

It happened that Kim had bought a Hi8 camcorder on the street just a couple of weeks before the storm hit. When the evacuation of New Orleans began, she roamed the Lower Ninth, filming her neighbours and asking them what they planned to do. Most of them didn’t have cars, and since the authorities hadn’t arranged for public transportation out of the city, many decided to tough it out.

When the water started rising, Kim and Scott brought neighbours into their well-stocked attic. From there, they watched as their street turned into an angry grey ocean, the corner stop sign nosing above the waves like a buoy. Eventually, heroic neighbour Larry Simms, using a punching bag as a life preserver, was able to ferry everyone to higher ground. Throughout, Kim kept shooting, providing awestruck and occasionally humorous commentary (“Katrina, she’s a bad chick”) until the electrical power was cut. “It was the most authentic document of that tragedy that I’ve seen,” Deal says.

Deal and Lessin expanded on the footage by following Kim, Scott and their friends in the weeks and months after the deluge. In the process, they came to learn a lot about their unintended subjects. When the Roberts leave the state to stay with relatives in Memphis, Tenn., Kim discovers a copy of a CD she had cut under her Tone-Loc-inspired alias, Black Kold Madina. As she tells us, she thought all her music had been lost in the storm. Putting on the disc, Kim accompanies herself on an autobiographical song called Amazing, a catalogue of her hard knocks as a kid from the Lower Ninth that bristles with survivor’s attitude. Rough but eloquent, it more than holds its own on a soundtrack that includes tunes by Citizen Cope, John Lee Hooker and Dr. John.

It’s an unexpectedly moving performance that surprised Deal and Lessin as much as it does the viewer. “We knew [Kim] had a gift for self-expression,” Deal says, “but we didn’t discover until well into our [filmmaking] process that she was a talented rapper.”

The Roberts have helped promote Trouble the Water and have used it to launch their own label, Born Hustler Records. You can bet they’ll be at the Academy Awards ceremony on Feb. 22. “We’re looking forward to walking the red carpet with them,” Deal says.

The Oscar nomination for best documentary feature is just the latest laurel for the film, which won the Grand Jury Prize at last year’s Sundance Film Festival and has been gathering critical raves since its U.S. release in August. Most significantly, Deal says, audiences in New Orleans have embraced it. “What we hear across the board is that people feel that this film validates their experiences of the storm. After our first screening [there], people implored us to take this film as far and wide as we could and make sure people see the real story.”

Scott Roberts, right, talks with National Guardsmen in a scene from Trouble the Water. (Elsewhere Films)

But the picture has had its detractors, too — most prominently, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, who famously lashed out at the federal government for its failure to deal swiftly with the disaster. Deal says that Nagin arrived late for a screening of the film at this past summer’s Democratic National Convention, stayed five minutes, and then walked out. “He and his entourage made it clear that they were not happy,” Deal says. “I’m not sure what it was that was offensive about the film, but something about the experiences it captured was not the image of New Orleans that they want to project right now.”

There are controversial moments in Trouble the Water, but Deal and Lessin wisely go beyond fault-finding. The egregious failures of both the levee system and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) have been well-documented on film, notably by Spike Lee in When the Levees Broke. Trouble the Water dwells on the human drama, with a compelling cast of characters led by the bewitching Kim and the gentle, reflective Scott. It also drops us smack in the middle of urban poverty, revealing, as the film’s executive producer, actor Danny Glover, has put it, the Third World in America’s own backyard.

New Orleans “has a lot in common with developing countries,” Deal says. “It has lots of natural resources that are extracted and taken out of the region and not exploited for the benefit of the people who live there. It’s a tourist-based economy where people come in, they spend money in the French Quarter, then they get on a plane and leave.”

Deal and Lessin, who are social activists as well as filmmakers, are hoping their film will help serve as a catalyst for change. The movie’s website includes links to a large number of relevant NGOs. “People come out of Trouble the Water and want to know what they can do, both in the Gulf Coast and in their own communities,” Deal says. “So, we’ve been working real hard on outreach around the issues in the film.”

Deal’s presence in Washington leads to the inevitable question: has President Barack Obama seen the film? “We’re working on it,” Deal says. “Obviously, he’s got a lot of things on his plate right now, but we’re crossing our fingers for a White House screening.”

Trouble the Water opens in Toronto on Feb. 13.

Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.