I don’t envy any documentarian trying to tackle the complex
tragedy of post-Katrina New Orleans, particularly in the wake of Spike
Lee’s masterful When the Levees Broke. In Kamp Katrina,
directors Ashley Sabin and David Redmon broach the subject from an
entirely different tact, taking an artless vérité
approach to one of the city’s infinite micro dramas of human loss.
After Katrina left thousands of New Orleans residents homeless and
unemployed, construction worker David Cross and his wife Ms. Pearl
opened their backyard to hurricane victims, creating a makeshift tent
city in an already troubled neighborhood. Dozens of residents who
literally lost everything created a sort of commune behind the home of
their benevolent hosts, and Kamp Katrina documents roughly four
months of the nearly Third World arrangement.
Unfortunately, this is not a film about people coming together in
the wake of a tragedy to create something good or meaningful. The
“kamp” is filled with crack addicts, mentally ill drifters, thieves,
and violent alcoholics, and Sabin and Redmon keep the cameras rolling,
lapping up all the horrific dysfunction with a leering voyeurism. We
watch women drunkenly pop out their glass eyeballs, men beat on their
girlfriends (while the filmmakers roll tape), pregnant women smoke
crack, and the mentally ill ramble on incoherently, and that’s about
it.
Save for one quick scene, this isn’t a film about how the system
failed these residents, nor is it about the moral decay of the site’s
benevolent aims. What it feels like is that two documentarians
discovered an uninhibited, flamboyant subject (Ms. Pearl), and when she
allowed ignorant, violent drug addicts to crash in her yard, the
filmmakers hit sensational pay dirt. There’s nothing redemptive or
humanistic about Kamp Katrina; the film is content to leer upon
human suffering without actually saying anything about it.