Kim Roberts happened to buy a $20 video camera just days before Hurricane Katrina hit her home city of New Orleans. The day before the storm hit, explaining why she was using the camera to record everything in sight, Kim was already talking apocalypse: “I’m showing the world that we still had a world, before the storm come,” she said, from behind the lens. “It’s like the Lord is upset, angry with New Orleans. And I don’t blame him.”

Roberts’ amateur video footage of her neighborhood shot before, during and after the storm is sprinkled throughout Carl Deal and Tia Lessin’s documentary Trouble the Water, which just won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. The footage itself has been billed as “harrowing,” but in practice most of it is too muddy and unfocused (literally on both counts) to make much of an impact. That said, the professionally shot material, of Roberts and her husband’s struggle to rebuild their lives after the storm, tells as powerful a story about the New Orleans diaspora as I’ve seen on film, from an angle unfamiliar. It plays out like a love story, with the Roberts’ turning their backs on their city in times of crisis, only to realize that their hearts are there after all.

Aspiring rapper Kim and husband Scott rode out the storm in a neighbor’s house after their own home flooded up to the roof. Scott spent much of the Hurricane in the shoulder-height water, using an abandoned punching bag to float women and children to safety. Deal and Lessin came into the picture after being approached by the Roberts at a Red Cross shelter two weeks after the storm, and the filmmakers traveled back to New Orleans with them to assess the damage. With their entire Lower Ninth Ward block in shambles (houses had still not been fully cleared of human corpses, and though Kim and Scott’s own dog came running up to great them, it was only after they’d already had to step over the drowned remains of someone else’s pet), the Roberts and a friend piled into a van and headed to a relatives house several states away for a fresh start.

During the storm, several people caught on Kim’s camera remark that what they’re experiencing is “like a movie,” and one warily predicts, “They probably got us on the news.” This kind of material really draws attention to the fact that this community, used to being virtually invisible to the media, was suddenly and abruptly put under a microscope for five days and then essentially abandoned by the cameras just as quickly. And yet, they fully understood that they were being watched and having their experiences mediated by cameras all along, but deprived of power (literally, electricity-less in drowned-out attics as well as powerless in a socialeconomic sense), they couldn’t witness that mediation first hand. The Roberts’ eagerness to tell their story thus becomes part of a larger theme of the couple using Katrina as impetus to take back control of their own lives.

Indeed, the Roberts temporarily look at Katrina as a blessing, an unlikely source of empowerment. “I don’t want to put my life in their hands no more,” they say, “their” being the bureaucracy of Louisiana. “I hated my life down there.” But the fresh start is harder than they expected, and minimum wage jobs and a lack of sense of community send them back to New Orleans. Scott goes to work rebuilding homes, and Kim funnels her experiences and frustrations into a new rap record. “The war is here,” Scott tells a gathering of National Guard troops, explaining why they’re needed more in his city than in Baghdad. Scott and Kim ultimately come back to join the fight for their hometown.

That might sound a little pat and … well … it can be. For all the Roberts have clearly struggled, Trouble the Water seems determined to turn their story into an inspiring one, a victory against the odds, and sometimes the films feels falsely upbeat as a consequence. But then it all comes back to the signature shot of Hurricane Katrina cinema––the passenger side pan through the devastated Lower Ninth, each address seemingly worse off than the last, an endless loop of senseless destruction. Maybe some day we’ll all become inured to the power of that image, but for me, at least, it hasn’t happened yet.