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self-consciously “definitive” like Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke, which despite its undeniable significance as a historical document, can’t possibly rival micro-budgeted projects like Low and Behold and Kamp Katrina in terms of microscopic attention to detail.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.”
