Breach of Faith

The documentary deploys that familiarity, along with the interviews, as relentlessly as a prosecutor in a court of law. Lee is clearly out to make an overwhelming case about government ineptitude, carelessness and racism, but the film is polemical in essence without being heavy-handed.

The usual suspects are allowed to simply hang themselves. And so we hear from President Bush, Michael "You're doing a heck of a job, Brownie!" Brown, Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and Col. Lewis Setliff of the Army Corps of Engineers. And talking heads have their say, ranging from historian Douglas Brinkley to activist Al Sharpton and a few journalists.

But ordinary people carry the narrative as Lee re-creates the earliest moments of the crisis. It is chilling to hear one of the survivors describe the arrival of the water on the New Orleans streets:

"I walked over to the sewer drain, storm drains, on the side of the street and I could hear this low rumbling gurgle coming at me. It sounded like just bubbling boil and it just spit out all over, spit out all over my shoes. Then I started hearing clang, clang, clang down the street, and it was the manhole covers popping off and the water was just blowing out the manhole covers and it was coming out of the storm drains and it was filling up. You could see it coming down the streets."

And so it was that hundreds of thousands of folks were left wading through filthy, chest-high water, left to fend for themselves and left, ultimately, destitute during months that have yet to end.

Katrina: The word conjures horrors. It conjures a collective psychic wound for many Americans, especially black Americans and, of course, most especially for the victims.

You think you know how deep it hurt, and then Gina Montanna takes it to another level, all the way down to that place in the soul where cultural memories are stored.

She's talking about the Katrina diaspora, with relatives separated, cast from city to city, state to state, from Utah to Florida. She's talking about 2005. But she's also talking about the distant past, about the ancestors, the slaves.

"With the evacuation scattering my family all over the United States," Montanna says quietly, "I felt like it was an ancient memory, as if we had been up on the auction block."

Families torn apart, still torn by pain.

Even the brief interlude in which victims tell of the sound of explosions they heard during the flooding, which gave rise to speculation that the levees were actually blown up -- even that moment is a measure of how deep the hurt runs, informed as it is by history. After all, back in the flood of 1927, levees were exploded to divert water from the city.

The list of indignities is long. The levees were poorly constructed. When they broke, there was no rescue, not even air drops of food and water as in the Asian tsunami, when foreigners got help from the United States within a day. Evacuees were dumped in new cities with few resources and no clear path of return to their homes. Returnees sometimes stumbled upon the remains of dead relatives inside homes that had allegedly already been searched. The trailers people were promised materialized ever so slowly. And hurricane season 2006 arrived with the levees still not sufficient to protect New Orleans.

But who pays the price? Cheryl Livaudais has something to say on that.

"They cost the people -- not just New Orleans and the Ninth Ward -- but the whole freakin' Southeast Louisiana. It cost the people their homes and their lives. I hope the politicians, or whoever did this, the Corps of Engineers, whoever -- I hope that they can sleep at night knowing they're the ones responsible."

She holds up her bottle of beer, saying, "And that's not this talking, that's the freakin' truth."

When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (four hours): Acts I and II debut tonight at 9; Acts III and IV debut tomorrow night at 9 on HBO.