Kamp Katrina (which opened a series of nationwide screenings last night at MoMA and continues a 2-week New York stint at the Pioneer Theater starting tonight) joins Low and Behold in the budding genre of micro-dramas dedicated to dismantling the clusterfuck that is post-Katrina New Orleans one personal story at a time. Whereas Low and Behold is a character drama that draws strength from documentary elements, Kamp Katrina is a documentary with an uncommon feel for character and an incredible narrative focus. Both stand in contrast to something self-consciously “definitive” like Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke, which despite its undeniable significance as a historical document, can’t possibly rival micro-budgeted projects like Low and Behold and Kamp Katrina in terms of microscopic attention to detail.

Kamp focuses on Ms. Pearl, a casually charitable resident of New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward who opens a tent city in her backyard to house displaced residents while they “get back on their feet.” Her companion David has a start-up construction business, through which he employs some of Kamp Katrina’s residents by day. By night, the four or five couples sleeping in the backyard cook communally and share pre-and-post Katrina horror stories.

It becomes clear very early on that, before the storm, the residents of Kamp Katrina were likely not really on their feet to begin with: for every one Kamper that lost a decent home and a good job in the storm, three or four were barely scraping by on the lowest rung of the economic ladder. Each of the women in the Kamp seems to have been the victim of some kind of domestic abuse; two such incidences are captured on camera, while another is memorialized in a camper’s glass eye. One of the men at Kamp Katrina, Charles, believes he’s in a relationship with Joan of Arc, who is the patron saint of Orleans. Charles acknowledges that even he can’t see his girlfriend, but maintains that the relationship is nothing less than real. “I can’t wait to see her in the flesh!” Charles announces to the camera. “All I have to do is be tortured to death first.”

In order to maintain some kind of order, Ms. Pearl institutes a number of rules: no drugs or alcohol; anyone who doesn’t seem to be making an effort to find work and/or housing must leave after a certain number of months; no one is allowed inside the house to take a shower–”unless you’re John Goodman.” But these rules are bent for the pregnant Kelley, to whom Ms. Pearl offers a small room with a twin bed.

Kelley comes to Kamp Katrina about three months into her pregnancy, with the baby’s daddy Doug in tow. When Kelley says she and Doug met at a Narcotics Anonymous meeting, it’s easy to see trouble on the horizon. When Ms. Pearl’s rules fall out of enforcement and Doug, to Kelley’s apparent frustration and disappointment, accompanies a group of Kampers to the “free beer store” (ie: an abandoned liquor shop), it seems clear to which bad end the denizens of Kamp Katrina are headed. But as the film progresses and residents one by one move on, Kamp Katrina settles into telling the story of Kelley and Doug, and the shared tragedy of this couple goes way beyond initial expectations.

Kamp Katrina is shot cinema verite style on prosumer digital video. The roughness inherent to the format produces unexpectedly exciting effects. As co-directors Ashley Sabin and David Redmon buzz like flies around the action in the tent city, their handheld cameras are set to low shutter speeds to compensate for a lack of natural light.The resulting image is slightly slowed, tinted neon pink, and at times, it almost seems to float off the screen. The hallucinogenic spin brought by the video amplifies the feeling that post-Katrina New Orleans might as well be on another planet, in as much as it resembles the “normal” American city.

For more info on Kamp Katrina, check out the film’s website.