When a New Orleans woman tells filmmakers trolling for Hurricane Katrina interviews, "All the footage I seen on TV, nobody ain't got what I got, I got right there in the hurricane," she isn't kidding.

Or exaggerating.

The week before the storm hit, Kimberly Rivers Roberts bought a camcorder for $20, thinking she could shoot birthday parties and document family moments.

With two hours left on the battery and a still camera as a backup, she chronicled Katrina from inside the wrath of the storm -- the attic of the house where she and others took refuge as the waters swallowed and gnawed at their Ninth Ward neighborhood.

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'Trouble the Water'

3 1/2 stars = Very good
Ratings explained

• Rating: Adult in nature for language, subject matter.
• Web site: troublethewaterfilm.com

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Filmmakers Tia Lessin and Carl Deal weave that fierce footage with the story of Kim and her husband, Scott Roberts, and assorted others as they navigate the FEMA maze, flee to Memphis and come home to rebuild their lives.

It's a little jumpy, the Louisiana accents sometimes are difficult to understand and the timeline shaky -- this is one case when a narrator could help connect the dots -- but "Trouble the Water" puts us at ground zero. As Kim says, "Katrina, she's a bad chick."

Lessin and Deal are New Yorkers who were horrified by images of elderly people sprawled on baggage claim carousels, bloated bodies in the water and other evidence of the too-late response that stranded or killed residents and decimated miles of coastal area.

They flew to Alexandria, La., a week after the storm. Drawn by National Guard soldiers returning from Iraq, they instead found Kim and Scott, the equivalent of moviemaker manna.

Aspiring rapper Kim, 24, and her husband are no saints but they're personable, candid, lacking in pretense and part of a social strata that is largely invisible. She was 13 when her mother died of AIDS and her brother was in prison when the levees broke.

An elderly relative died when a hospital wasn't evacuated as promised and her son says, "I saw the images on TV of the hospital and a lot of bodies laying there covered up. It's hard to look at it and try to figure out which one is your mom."

Even though those pictures were everywhere in 2005, it's shocking to see them again, especially after riding out the storm with this motley, sympathetic crew.

The filmmakers say their intent was to "make a dramatic movie, not to deliver information" but the goals are not mutually exclusive. The movie's assertion that "billions of federal dollars have not been disbursed" is a sweeping indictment that deserves more attention than an on-screen note.

This is advocacy filmmaking as Lessin and Deal contrast the sleek casino, aquarium and shopping mall with the weeds, abandoned cars and empty houses frozen in mid-collapse in the lower Ninth Ward a year after the hurricane.

"Trouble the Water," which makes excellent use of music, is an unvarnished story of the powerless and the people who lost everything ... except their faith in starting over and the comfort of home.

Opens Friday at the Harris Theater, Downtown.