NYC-Feature Story

Documentaries Profile New Orleans Survivors
Not as Seen on TV and Talkin’ Water

By Boubacar Diallo

Everyone in the U.S remembers Hurricane Katrina, the natural catastrophe that ravaged the once bustling and beautiful city of New Orleans in 2005. But how many of us have imagined what its survivors went through after the disaster?

Not As Seen On TV and Talkin’ Water are two films that show what happened after the storm. Suprena Levy and Sade Falebita, teens from New York City, and Briceshanay Gresham and Rodneka Shelbia, two teens from New Orleans who lived through the storm, spent three weeks in the summer of 2006 interviewing people across New Orleans, from simple townsfolk to government representatives. The result was Not As Seen On TV, a documentary about Katrina survivors. Talkin’ Water is a documentary showing how the girls made the film.

Left for Dead

I enjoyed watching both films because they perfectly expressed the emotion and pain that the filmmakers and hurricane survivors went through. The most shocking and emotional stories were those of Miss Valentine and Miss Donna.

Miss Valentine is a poet whose life was completely overturned by the hurricane. She went from living in her own house to surviving in a tiny trailer, losing everything in the process. Miss Valentine, just like many other residents, received very little help from the government and lived from day to day with barely enough to survive.

Miss Valentine went through a harsh experience, but Miss Donna’s story was even worse. Miss Donna and her family were unable to flee the town when the storm struck. Her house was completely flooded by the hurricane and she was trapped for days, unable to leave to get food or water.

She was left for dead by the National Guard, she said. “They flashed their lights at us but did nothing, as if it was a joke!” she told the filmmakers.

Exposing the Truth

After days of forced starvation and drinking heated storm water, she finally escaped to a field designated by the National Guard as a refugee camp for survivors. She was then taken to another camp where she almost got separated from her child.

The girls who made Not As Seen On TV wanted to denounce the lack of compassion showed to hurricane survivors by both the American government and the mainstream media. In their films, Americans may see things that NBC, FOX and other giant media corporations didn’t show on TV. These mainstream news sources showed some of what happened to survivors like Miss Donna, but I don’t think they critiqued the way the government failed to help survivors. Sade, Suprena, Briceshanay, and Rodneka were independent filmmakers—in other words, not funded by large corporations or the government—so they had the freedom to interview anyone they wanted, and to broadcast whatever they felt was most important. With their cameras, they literally exposed the truth to viewers’ eyes.

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