Kimberly Roberts

Most Americans recall with aching clarity the images from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The majority of the footage shown on the news was shot from a safe distance away in a helicopter.

Kimberly Roberts was a lifelong resident of New Orleans and happened to purchase a camcorder a few days before Katrina struck. She used the camera to film her neighbors, relatives, and friends in the Lower Ninth Ward who couldn’t or wouldn't evacuate the city.

She was able to capture on film the conditions of a pre-Katrina Ninth Ward and its nervous residents, the hurricane itself (she refused to stop filming even as her house began to flood and was forced to seek refuge in her small attic), and lackluster relief efforts following the storm.

Roberts, her husband Scott, and several neighbors were able to escape the attic of her home and reach the second floor of a nearby house by using a large punching bag as a flotation device and shuttling themselves through the flood waters. One of her relatives perished in the flood. In the photo above, Roberts has returned to her home after the flood and triumphantly holds a photograph of her late mother, who passed away in the 1990s from AIDS-related complications, that hung high enough on a wall of her home that it survived the raging, polluted waters.

She and her husband happened to meet filmmakers Carl Deal and Tia Lesson at a Red Cross shelter in Louisiana. Lesson and Deal filmed Roberts in the weeks after Katrina and used the film taken by Roberts to tell her story in the commercially released documentary "Trouble the Water."

The raw footage taken by Kimberly Roberts gives viewers a unique and painful firsthand look at the tragedy of Katrina and the failure of the state and federal governments' half-hearted rescue of the citizens of New Orleans. The movie also yields an impressive sample of Roberts' original rap music, which she performs in the name of Black Kold Medina.

Kimberly came in at number 4, besting Angelina Jolie, in Time magazine's list of Top 10 movie performances in 2008.
 

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Past Progressive Victory Artists of the Month

* Charlene Strong
* Dan Guerrero
* E. Ethelbert Miller
* MaryBeth Guinan
* Ron Edwards
* Erik Sosa
* Elise Bryant
* Corey Gammel & Peter Marquez
* Jeri Riggs
* Robert Shetterly
* Judy Chicago
* Naomi Shihab Nye