Requiem for New Orleans

There are dozens of events being planned, big and small, for the one-year annivesary of Katrina, coming this August 29. (You can visit our friends at the New Orleans Network for a good list of what's happening in the Big Easy.) But one of the most anticipated in New Orleans is a screening this week of Spike Lee's new four-hour HBO documentary, "When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts."

Lee started filming the epic in September, when he flew to the city after watching the catastrophe while at a film festival in Venice, as he told Newsweek:

"It looked like what I assume Hiroshima looked like after World War II," he said as his car rolled past still-uncollected piles of trash and debris. "I didn't know what to expect when I got here, but I didn't expect what I saw, that's for sure."

The film began as a two-hour documentary, but HBO allowed Lee to expand it to three then four hours, allowing it to explore different sides of the storm and tell a story that may come as a surprise:

Act I covers the storm's arrival; Act II chronicles the failure of the emergency response; Act III follows an abandoned community coming to grips with all that it lost, and Act IV addresses the halting, haphazard effort to begin again. But images and ideas echo through each act like a fugue. Lee's voice is rarely heard; he lets Terence Blanchard's thundering brass score, dizzy with grief, do the speaking for him. (Blanchard, who has now collaborated with Lee 13 times, is a New Orleans native. In one of the film's most wrenching scenes, Blanchard visits the wreckage of his boyhood home with his aging mother.) Most of Katrina's victims were black, but Lee hasn't made a racial polemic. Some viewers will be surprised to find that Lee views the tragedy as a national betrayal rooted in class, not skin color. To him, what the victimized share most is that they had very little to begin with and were left with nothing.

Lee puts the camera on a range of big players, from Mayer Ray Nagin to Sean Penn doing hurricane relief; he has a special passage ridiculing Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice's shoe-shopping trip in Manhattan as the city drowned in flood water. But the core of the narrative is told by Phyllis Montana LeBlanc, a 42-year-old survivor from the Lower Ninth Ward -- who makes clear that for thousands, the tragedy of Katrina is far from over:

LeBlanc draws laugh after laugh in the film, but in real life she still panics every time she feels a raindrop. When a storm hits, she runs down the street to a friend's trailer and locks the door until it passes. She'd like to take something for her nerves, but that would require getting in line at 3 a.m. to see a city-appointed mental-health specialist. For her, Lee's film was more than just a chance to tell the world her story. It was therapy. "To be honest, I'm not sure what I would have done if Spike hadn't come when he did," she says. "I had a nervous breakdown right after Katrina, and I was fighting every day not to have another one. But talking about it to someone who I know cared about me and the people who suffered through this-it saved my sanity in a way. And I'm sure I'm not the only one."

Aside from what looks like a visual and mind-provoking feast, another treat: the film features Lee's 13th collaboration with Terence Blanchard, the grammy-winning trumpeter and composer (and New Orleans native).