Study Guide: Lessons in Privilege, Resistance and Resiliency—PLAN A CAMPUS SCREENING NOW!
When Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf and the floodwaters rose and tore through New Orleans, plunging its remaining population into a carnival of misery, it did not turn the region into a “Third World country”, as has been disparagingly implied in the media; it revealed one. It revealed the disaster within the disaster; grueling poverty rose to the surface like a bruise to our skin.
But the storm not only revealed the poverty of those most vulnerable, those left behind. It revealed the poverty of skewed priorities – of a government that had subcontracted its responsibilities to the private sector and abdicated responsibility altogether when it came to housing, health care, education and even evacuation.
This can be seen as symptomatic of a deeper pathology: a nexus of structural racism, poverty, disenfranchisement and violence that is the daily lived experience of many Americans in New Orleans and indeed in every other city of this country.
Hurricane Katrina revealed the poverty of a mindset that had become blind to the role of culture in sustaining the mental health and social wellness of people; blind to the role of culture in education, through which we are prepared for our responsibilities in a democracy; and hostile to the role of culture in the search for truth. Perhaps more than anything else, it revealed a poverty of imagination.
Trouble the Water got deeply inside of this conundrum, by getting inside the experience of people living it directly. People who were living on self-described margins who, in responding to the terrible crisis of the storm and its aftermath, came to realize their own self-worth and see their lives in a different way, and be transformed by that experience. When, as a viewer, you feel the power of that, you start to think about all the structural injustice you see in every day life, and you start to think about it in a different way. Mainly you start to think: it doesn’t have to be this way.
As the great actor, singer and activist Paul Robeson once said, “It’s not enough for an artist to create the reality he sees, it is incumbent upon him to create the reality he can imagine.” Trouble the Water powerfully illustrates the role that cultural production and art can play in provoking empathy and connection among us all.
The accompanying materials will help to guide the dialogue, and deepen our understanding of the structural causes of injustice, even as the film cultivates that most powerful instrument of response: our imaginations.
—Danny Glover & Joslyn Barnes
Executive Producers and co-founders of Louverture Films
ORDER EDUCATIONAL DVD AND MATERIALS HERE: http://www.troublethewaterfilm.com/page/s/eddvd
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