when the levees broke Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Will Smith, his production company Overbrook Entertainment, and Sony have bought the rights to the life story of Hurricane Katrina hero, John "The Can Man" Keller. While John Lee Hancock will be writing the script and directing The American Can, Sony has also bought a spec script about Keller from writer and producer Adetoro Makinde. Keller himself is also one of the associate producers.

Keller, who was a resident of the American Can Company at the time of the storm, helped the other residents of the building -- many elderly and/or handicapped -- and a few refugees stay safe while the flood waters raged outside. Keller also documented his story with photos and videotape. He told The Times-Picayune in 2007, "There were other people rescuing people. But they didn't hot-wire boats, hot-wire cars, swim to the grocery store, come back with food, cook for all those people, organize them, get the thugs off them." In the end, 244 people were evacuated safely with help from Keller.

In 255 minutes, Spike Lee investigated the New Orleans disaster that followed Hurricane Katrina with When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts. The project garnered the filmmaker much critical praise as well a collection of Emmys, which included Outstanding Directing for Nonfiction Programming. And now Reuters reports that Spike Lee isn't done with the topic.

At Silverdocs, Lee said: "I'm going to go back, not just to New Orleans but to other areas affected, because it's not over." He wouldn't discuss the details of the next project, though he did allude to his focus: "What the press is not really talking about is the mental state -- suicide, self-medication. It's horrible." But that's not all, he also suggested that there might be a scripted feature on the post-Katrina devastation in the works, written by David Simon (The Wire).

In the wake of films like When the Levees Broke and Dear Zachary, I think it's excellent that filmmakers are attempting to continue the story. We always hear about the immediate devastation, but rarely do we see the long-trailing affects of the news.

Silverdocs, the annual documentary film festival in Maryland hosted by AFI and the Discovery Channel, announced today that it plans to honor Spike Lee at the eight-day gathering in June. It's an interesting choice. Anyone active in the documentary community can rattle off a ton of accomplished filmmakers in the field whose degrees of visibility will never reach Lee's celebrity stature. Nanette Burstein? Marina Zenovich? Nick Broomfield? All talented directors with growing bodies of work deserved of recognition, especially by the doc-friendly crowd.

But I'm not complaining. Lee has proven himself just as competent in the arena of non-fiction, and he rarely gets the same kind of credit for it. When the Levees Broke was the essential survey of Hurricane Katrina's crippling impact, and 4 Little Girls mourned death and persecution without negating the perseverance of human spirit. With the unique sort of rabble-rousing Lee has been known for, he's a sort of documentary film himself: During previous public appearances, he has lashed out at a number of targets ranging from George W. Bush to 50 Cent. Silverdocs plans to put him onstage this summer after screenings of his films for a discussion of his career, but who knows what sort of controversy he'll stir up? A good one, no doubt.

There's more news this week from the International Documentary Association, which will hold its annual award ceremony on Dec. 7. We told you about the main nominees back in October, followed by the announcement last week that Michael Moore would be given a career achievement trophy. Now the IDA has revealed the winners of four special categories.

First, Spike Lee's Hurricane Katrina doc When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts has won the Pare Lorentz Award, named for the pioneering documentarian and given to films that carry on his activist spirit. (The IDA sponsored a Pare Lorentz Film Festival a few weeks ago; see this item for more background on the subject.) Lee's film beats out nine other nominees, which included Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience and A Walk to Beautiful.

A film called Sputnik Mania, about the Soviet Union's first forays into space exploration in the 1950s, wins the IDA/ABC News VideoSource Award. This prize is to honor the film that best incorporates TV news footage into its story. Other nominees included My Kid Could Paint That and Steal a Pencil for Me.

The IDA honors television docs, too, with awards for best continuing series and best limited series. The continuing series winner is Showtime's version of Ira Glass' National Public Radio mainstay This American Life. Its competition included Morgan Spurlock's FX program 30 Days and PBS' American Masters. The limited series winner is The Supreme Court, a four-part PBS series about, um, the Supreme Court. Fellow nominees included Logo's Coming Out Stories and HBO's Addiction.

The big ceremony for the Emmys isn't until Sunday night, but the Creative Arts awards, which include nonfiction programming, have already been announced, as Variety has reported. Several documentaries that originally played film festivals took home Emmys, including Spike Lee's look at post-Katrina New Orleans, When the Levees Broke. The HBO-produced film won three awards for directing, exceptional merit in nonfiction filmmaking and picture editing. I own the DVD myself and highly recommend it, although you'll want to have a box of tissue close at hand.

Other Emmy-winning documentaries included A Lion in the House, which shared the exceptional merit award with Levees, and Ghosts of Abu Ghraib, which won for best nonfiction special. As usual, filmmaker/blogger A.J. Schnack, who keeps a close watch on all documentary-related news, has the best roundup of Emmys given to documentary films, so you don't have to pick through a longer list of all the Creative Arts awards for guest appearances on TV dramas and so forth. He's also posted a photo from the awards ceremony of the producing teams from Lion and Levees together. I love seeing Spike Lee with his Emmy statuette and hope it's a sight we'll enjoy again with future projects.

Many critics consider When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts to be the best documentary of 2006, but it wasn't eligible for the Academy Award because it was released on HBO rather than in theaters. Fortunately the film and its director, Spike Lee, are getting recognition from other places, such as the George Polk Awards, which honors the best in journalism from the previous year. Lee and producer Sam Pollard were named as winners of a television documentary prize, which they'll receive at the annual awards luncheon April 12.

As far as I can tell, a Polk Award for film or television documentary is rarely given -- the previous one was handed out in 1994 (though Fred Wiseman did win a career award in 2005 for his contributions to film journalism) -- so this is a very special honor. It is also probably a great convenience to Lee since Long Island University, which gives out the awards, is literally around the corner from the filmmaker's 40 Acres and a Mule production offices in Brooklyn (too bad the luncheon will be in Manhattan instead of on campus). Read Ryan's review of When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, and check out the doc, still airing on HBO and available on DVD.

I don't have HBO -- I've got just enough cable to get decent network reception and to enjoy local cable access shows. And yet, having grown up in the New Orleans area, I was dying to see Spike Lee's documentary about post-Katrina New Orleans, When the Levees Broke, which aired on HBO late last month. I've been checking the HBO, Amazon, and Netflix websites to determine when a DVD might be released -- it seemed to me that if ever a day-and-date release was warranted, this would be it.

Last week, BoingBoing reported that someone had posted the documentary to YouTube in 26 parts. (The footage has since been removed.) Hollywood Reporter's Risky Biz Blog picked up the story and contacted HBO to find out when the four-hour documentary might be released on DVD. HBO couldn't provide a date because "there are lots of tricky rights and clearance issues with the movie." I don't understand this at all -- When the Levees Broke was shot within the past year, and surely any permissions would have been for DVD as well as for broadcast? Would HBO be short-sighted enough not to see the potential for DVD? I'm not paying for full cable and HBO just to watch a single movie, but I would buy this DVD in a heartbeat if it were available right now.

Risky Biz compares the problem (and the subsequent illegal downloads available on the Web) to the situation with the 1987 civil-rights documentary Eyes on the Prize, which isn't available on DVD because the rights expired and were too expensive to renew. Isn't it time to re-examine the fine points of copyright law and the way documentaries are affected? In the meantime, I suspect that many people will resort to finding internet downloads to watch otherwise-unavailable films like When the Levees Broke.

Though the titles revealed yesterday (apart from the festival's opener, The Black Dahlia), were English-free, the just-announced lineup for the 2006 Venice Film Festival includes thirteen American films, many of which are in competition. In addition to The Black Dahlia, other American films competing for the Golden Lion this year include: The Fountain, Bobby, Hollywoodland and Children of Men. Among other notables competing for the top prizes are the legendary Alain Resnais (Private Fears in Public Places), Johnnie To (Fangzhu), Paul Verhoeven (Blackbook) and Steven Frears, whose The Queen will bow at Venice before opening the New York Film Festival.

As expected, David Lynch's Inland Empire will be screening out of competition, along with a diverse group that includes Kenneth Branagh's The Magic Flute, World Trade Center, Tales from Earthsea (the debut from Goro Miyazaki), The Wicker Man, Rob-B-Hood (the Jackie Chan stolen-baby movie), Ethan Hawke's The Hottest State, Benoît Jacquot's L'Intouchable, and When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, Spike Lee's Katrina doc.

This year's festival runs from August 30 to September 9.