In the documentary "Trouble the Water," lives intersect to tell a very personal Katrina story

This year's Sundance Film Festival may have produced more than the usual number of puzzling prize winners ("Choke," anyone?), but the Grand Jury Prize for the top documentary went to a film that's now widely regarded as an instant classic: "Trouble the Water," which opens at the Varsity Friday.

The story of rap artist Kimberly Rivers Roberts, who shot home-video footage of Hurricane Katrina while she was trapped in New Orleans' Ninth Ward, it ended up being the work of several filmmakers working in collaboration. One is a major star.

"This subject is so close to me, yet it's absent from our conversations," said Danny Glover when he introduced the picture at the Seattle International Film Festival in June. "We can't allow this blindness to determine what we need to do."

Although Glover is listed as a producer on the film, its co-directors, Tia Lessin and Carl Deal, had nearly completed it by the time Glover's producing partner, Joslyn Barnes, arranged for him to see it about a year ago.

"They were able to bring in finishing funds," said Deal. "They gave us all kinds of support. One of the things that Danny connects with is that it's a really inspiring story. It's not the story you expect to see. It's very hopeful, very life-affirming."

"They [Glover and Barnes] had known about this project for some time," said Lessin. "We shot for a couple of years. We wanted to put our best foot forward when we showed it to them."

Deal and Lessin, at home in New York in 2005 when the levees broke, knew nothing about Roberts when they took their cameras to New Orleans. Television coverage of Katrina moved them to go.

"I was overwhelmed by everything I saw, and feeling a bit helpless, not knowing what to do," said Deal. "We felt a profound sense of outrage at what was happening."

Lessin initially wanted to focus on the Louisiana National Guard and made arrangements with the Guard to get access. But when they met Roberts and saw the storm footage she'd shot, the movie took off in a different direction.

"As filmmakers, you want to be open to what's actually happening in front of you, instead of what you have in your head," said Lessin.

"It was part serendipity, part luck," she said. They were in the Red Cross shelter when Kimberly approached them with her husband, Scott.

"You look for characters to follow," said Lessin. "We could see how powerful their story was, and how traumatic it had been for them." (The filmmakers had previously worked as producers on Michael Moore's "Bowling for Columbine.")

"Kimberly's footage is sprinkled throughout the film," said Deal. "We use about 15 minutes of it in the first hour. Some of it was shot before the hurricane, so you see a slice of life in the Ninth Ward, just hours before the levees washed so much of that away."

One of the challenges the filmmakers had to face: There was a limit on her footage, so they had to find archival material and third-party footage that would match what she had shot.

"Her camera battery died two hours into the storm," said Deal. "But she had a still camera, so she was able to record some images. We just had this handheld home video to work with, by someone who'd never shot a lick of footage before, but it had this incredible poetry behind it."

Only later did they discover that Roberts was an aspiring rap artist. At one point during the filming, she thought she'd lost the music she had recorded, but a cousin in Memphis had a copy of the CD. She performs to it in the film.

"Her performance of that song was very genuine and very joyful," said Deal. "After having been in front of our cameras for a week, Kimberly said she'd seen herself in a different way."

Since "Trouble the Water" was screened at Sundance in January, it's undergone some tweaking, including updates. At the Seattle festival screening, Glover said, "Scott is my adopted nephew now."

"We did postscripts not just to tell what happened to this couple but to suggest the story of so many hundreds and thousands of people," said Deal.

"It's a story that defies a lot of stereotypes that we were seeing built up around Katrina and New Orleans' black residents. It seemed like the media were casting people as either helpless victims or rampaging looters, and Kimberly and Scott fit neither of those categories."

John Hartl: johnhartl@yahoo.com