Filmmaker Edward Buckles Jr. was 13 years old when Hurricane Katrina struck his hometown of New Orleans in 2005. The storm wiped away his home, his community, and something slightly less tangible, but no less important.
“I lost my childhood because of that storm,” Buckles has written, “and it drastically impacted the rest of my life.”
In his Oscar-contending documentary Katrina Babies, Buckles seeks to understand the impact of Katrina on those like him who were kids in New Orleans when the hurricane decimated all they knew. His conversations with cousins, friends and others reveal a common sense of unprocessed trauma. Before the documentary, they hadn’t been given the chance to talk about all they had experienced.
“After losing so much, why wouldn’t anyone ask if we were okay?” Buckles wonders in voiceover in the film. “Nobody ever asked the children how they were doing.”
The director has a theory about why the feelings of the children were overlooked.
“I can only assume that it’s the lack of empathy, the lack of concern of what happens to Black and disenfranchised people in these situations,” Buckles tells Deadline. “It’s that double-edged sword of resilience. It’s like people thinking that we’re always going to be okay, we’re going to always be all right, like, ‘They’re strong, they’re good.’”
The reality was something far more complex. What these Katrina babies have carried for so long, often without realizing it, came to the surface during the interviews. Tears spilled from Miesha Williams’ eyes as she spoke with Buckles, affirming she had never discussed what she went through during the storm and its aftermath. She remembered the explosive sound of the levees breaking, which would inundate the city in water. And she recalled seeing a dead body outside the Convention Center in New Orleans once the storm passed, and wondering if she, too, would die.
Those interviewed in the film describe a feeling of bewilderment in the wake of the storm and, in the longer term, of losing a cherished sense of place. Buckles talks of joyous routines before Katrina when he would spend hour after hour playing with his cousins in the 7th Ward, and of their last time together, as the hurricane bore down. He remembers pre-Katrina New Orleans as a haven built around family, hospitality, warmth: “The houses smelled of good food.” Katrina swept it all away.
The hurricane “destroyed so much more than just our homes,” he says. “It killed our traditions. It killed our culture, it killed our family dynamics.”
Many in the city had no means of evacuation; Buckles’ beloved cousins stayed behind as Katrina struck. Buckles and his family got out just hours earlier, his mother heeding the warnings of Mayor Ray Nagin, and her own presentiment that disaster was coming. When they finally found a place to stop in a small town in Southern Louisiana, taking refuge in a flea market converted to an emergency shelter, 13-year-old Edward asked an adult what had become of those stuck behind. The woman told him, “Everybody who stayed in New Orleans is dead.” He recalls bursting into tears.
Buckles’ cousins survived, but like so many others, were dispersed outside New Orleans, never to return. Buckles’ family eventually did go back, to a very changed city. Old neighborhoods were destroyed, and local people were relocated to areas that weren’t home to them.
“One of the things that I hope is illuminated in the film is that not only was there not care taken in every level that you can think of from a humanity standpoint [after the storm], but from a historical standpoint, they were very territorial people,” producer Audrey Rosenberg observes of New Orleans natives. “Generations of people [identified with] their ward.” She says people endured a major trauma, only to have officials relocate them “within their own city without any thought of the damage it could cause, violence it could cause, confusion it could cause, and incredible loss.”
“Most of us are being forced to live in the east, are forced to live on the outskirts of New Orleans,” Buckles says. “And they’re putting these neighborhoods that were once rivals together. And that’s causing a lot of bloodshed.”
Since Katrina, New Orleans has become a smaller, whiter city. Gentrification has changed neighborhoods.
“I wanted to go and live where my cousins once lived while I was working on the film, so I moved to the neighborhood in like this shotgun house,” Buckles says. “Before the storm, the house was probably worth about, I would say, $38,000. And after the storm, it was worth $400,000. I would step outside my [door] mainly at nighttime and the white people next to me are looking at me like, ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ And I’m looking at them like, ‘What the hell are ya’ll doing here?’”
The film uses striking animation created by Spanish graphic artist Antoni Sendra, helping to evoke the vitality of New Orleans before Katrina.
“A lot of our documentation is gone, it was washed away,” Buckles notes. “A lot of our family history was washed away when it comes to video. So, we thought animation could be a powerful language to tell those stories that we didn’t have the footage for.”
The images of Katrina in the film feel less harsh, less extractive and cold than news footage Americans grew used to seeing.
“We did a really tireless search in a very sensitive way with the community, and with [Edward’s] family and with the Katrina babies to find any fully original footage and things that most people haven’t seen to supplement some of the news footage,” Rosenberg says, crediting archival producer Kate Ferraguto with making careful choices about what news archive was used.
Buckles adds, “It was important to me, for my community and for my people to take that archival footage and give it its power and give it the correct narrative, because I’ve seen it misused so many times, year after year. I’ve seen it exploited.”
Katrina Babies, from HBO Documentary Films, is currently streaming on HBO Max. It premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in June, where Buckles won the Best New Documentary Director Award. Over the weekend, the film competed for Best Feature at the IDA Documentary Awards in Hollywood.
“One of the surprising things about the film is that it’s not just a sad story about down-and-out people or oppression or injustice–even though all of that is also true,” Rosenberg comments. “The film, beyond all of the systemic issues that obviously it brings up, is so personal and it also captures hope and spirit, and as we said before, the double-edged sword of resilience.”
“This is not just the sad story. We are not sad people. I’m very happy,” Buckles says with a laugh. “We are really thriving down there. This film is to take a look back at some of the wrong that was done so that we can continue to heal from it and continue to be hopeful about our future and about the New Orleans that we are rebuilding.”