How is it that Hurricane Katrina managed to revolutionize American attitudes about the environment, but somehow the very people most devastated by the storm have become refugees in their own country, and their experiences have been all but forgotten? In Trouble the Water, this voiceless population becomes vibrantly human as documentarians Tia Lessin and Carl Deal trail native New Orleans filmmaker and hip-hop musician Kimberly Rivers Roberts and her husband, Scott, on a powerful journey of survival that leads from the Ninth Ward to Memphis and back again.

We talked with Tia Lessin and Carl Deal about their film which garned the Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary and why they scrapped their original film project after meeting the Roberts, how documentarians should abandon the idea of keeping a distance form their subjects, and why Trouble the Water is not a Katrina story, per se.

Tia Lessin was the supervising producer of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, which won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes International Film Festival, and the Academy Award–winning Bowling for Columbine. She was also line producer of Martin Scorsese’s No Direction Home: Bob Dylan. Her work as the senior producer of the satirical television series The Awful Truth earned her two Emmy nominations and one arrest. Carl Deal was the archival producer for Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 and Bowling for Columbine and has contributed to many other documentaries, including recent Sundance Film Festival audience favorites Murderball and God Grew Tired of Us. He is a 2007 Sundance Institute Fellow.