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The Guardian
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time review – a gripping, epic look at the New Orleans tragedy 20 years on
What makes a disaster into a tragedy? It's a question that looms large over the five episodes of this gripping and frequently upsetting series exploring the events that overwhelmed New Orleans in late August 2005. According to the community organiser and survivor Malik Rahim, the answer is simple: 'A tragedy is when we fail to do what we should be doing.' Hurricane Katrina's size and ferocity meant that it was probably always going to be a disaster. Traci A Curry's documentary explores the man-made element of the catastrophe. This isn't the first epic series to tackle this subject and it isn't quite the best. Made in Katrina's immediate aftermath, Spike Lee's 2006 masterpiece When the Levees Broke was a polemic wrenched from the soul, mining furious energy from the proximity of the event. Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time is more reflective and less visceral as those at the heart of the story now bear witness at two decades' remove. The dominant tone has shifted from anger to resigned sadness. All the same, it still packs a powerful punch. Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time tells its story in linear fashion, as if laying out a legal prosecution case. First, it shows that there was no excuse for the city to be as unprepared as it was. New Orleans actually got lucky with Katrina. The eye of the storm just missed the city. However, as the documentary explains, the area had, over decades, reduced its natural hurricane defences as the surrounding wetlands (which had mitigated storm surges) were diminished by the activities of oil and gas companies. An enormous storm had been war-gamed a year earlier and for weeks before Katrina hit, the imminent arrival of 'the big one' had been recognised as inevitable. Lucrece Phillips, a survivor who is lucidly eloquent throughout, remembers 'a quiet calmness that was deafening'. The authorities apparently shared that calmness; we watch preparations that seem to involve telling everyone to leave, making plans to open up the Superdome stadium to stragglers and winging it from there. So began the process of turning disaster into tragedy. The scenes in and around the Superdome are shocking in their itemisation of American racial polarisation. Shelton Alexander wound up there with his brother. 'It's just a sea of Black folks,' he observed. Whatever the intentions behind the opening of the Superdome, as we witness conditions worsen and the authorities' response become increasingly heavy-handed, it's impossible to see the situation as anything other than poor Black Americans being neglected, disregarded and pushed around by white Americans. Gen Russel Honoré, who was commander of the relief taskforce, recalls having to tell soldiers to stop waving their guns, reminding them that they were there to help, not intimidate. Eventually, what emerges is a perfect storm; the series is a devastatingly precise illustration of systemic failure, political impotence and media distortion. Irresponsible reporting started to negatively affect the quality of the response – drivers of emergency vehicles became reluctant to venture into the Superdome due to repeated suggestions that the building was essentially a deadly riot zone rather than simply a holding pen full of desperate people. Black people who 'escaped' from their designated areas risked being shot by white vigilantes – at least five people lost their lives that way. At the time, Katrina was widely regarded as a decisive moment; a disaster that held up a mirror to a society that didn't like what it saw. It tainted the final term of George W Bush (who incidentally gets off very lightly in this documentary, really only seen as he impotently flies over the area). It helped to usher in the presidency of Barack Obama. But viewed from the perspective of 2025, it looks like a series of early warnings that weren't heeded. Subsequently, the horror has been parlayed into an opportunity for some – in the final episode, we're shown a gentrified and sanitised city, with Katrina survivors scattered to all corners of the country. Like Netflix's recent Grenfell: Uncovered, Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time is ultimately a story of betrayal. People largely responded to impossible situations with courage, kindness and forbearance. Stories of heroism rooted in community spirit abound. And yet, like Grenfell, there's an inevitability to it all, in the relative fates of the people who let a disaster become a tragedy and the victims of that tragedy. The ignominies kept coming. Freedom of movement within the country was curtailed. The survivors were, to their fury, called 'refugees'. Even the insurance settlements favoured rich over poor. Rightly, Rahim is given the last word: 'We are the canaries in this coalmine called America.' Eventually, Hurricane Katrina went beyond disaster and even tragedy and entered the realm of scandal. This documentary feels timely and resonant because, 20 years on, it still seems like unfinished business. Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time is on Disney+ and National Geographic
Los Angeles Times
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
‘Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time' focuses on disaster victims, who reflect 20 years later
It's been 20 years since Hurricane Katrina reshaped the City of New Orleans. Spike Lee examined the disaster with two big HBO documentaries, the 2006 'When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts,' just a year after the event, and a 2010 sequel, 'If God Is Willing and Da Creek Don't Rise,' and is involved with a new work for Netflix, 'Katrina: Come Hell and High Water,' arriving in late August. Other nonfiction films have been made on the subject over the years, including 'Trouble the Water,' winner of the grand jury prize at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, Nova's 'Hurricane Katrina: The Storm That Drowned a City,' 'Hurricane Katrina: Through the Eyes of the Children,' and 'Dark Water Rising: Survival Stories of Hurricane Katrina Animal Rescues,' while the storm also framed the excellent 2022 hospital-set docudrama 'Five Days at Memorial.' As a personified disaster with a human name and a week-long arc, it remains famous, or infamous, and indelible. In the gripping five-part 'Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time,' premiering over two subsequent nights beginning Sunday at 8 p.m. on National Geographic (all episodes stream on Hulu and Disney+ Monday), director Traci A. Curry ('Attica') necessarily repeats many of Lee's incidents and themes. But she finds her own way through mountains of material in the series that is at once highly compelling and difficult to watch — though I suggest you do. Though there are many paths to take through the story, they lead to the same conclusions. Curry speaks with survivors, activists, scientists, officials and journalists, some of whom also appear in archival footage, but her eye is mainly on the victims, the people who lost their homes, people who lost their people, those unable to evacuate, for lack of money or transportation or the need to care for family members. If the storm itself was an assault on the city, most everything else — the broken levees, the flooded streets, the slow government response, the misinformation, the exaggerations and the mischaracterizations taken as fact — constituted an attack on the poor, which in New Orleans meant mostly Black people. ('The way they depicted Black folks,' says one survivor regarding sensational media coverage of the aftermath, when troops with automatic weapons patrolled the streets as if in a war zone, 'it's like they didn't see us as regular people, law abiding, churchgoing, hard working people.') Effective both as an informational piece and a real-life drama, 'Race Against Time' puts you deep into the story, unfolding as the week did. First, the calm before the storm ('One of the most peaceful scariest things,that a person can experience,' says one 8th Ward resident), as Katrina gained power over the Gulf of Mexico. Then the storm, which ripped off part of the Superdome roof, where citizens had been instructed to shelter, and plunged the city into darkness; but when that passed, it looked briefly like the apocalypse missed them. Then the levees, never well designed, were breached in multiple locations and 80% of the city, which sits in a bowl between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain, found itself under water. Homes drown: 'You're looking at your life, the life that your parents provided for you, your belongings being ruined, your mother's furniture that she prided is being thrown against a wall.' Residents are driven onto roofs, hoping for rescue, while dead bodies float in the water. This is also in many ways the most heartening part of the series, as neighbors help neighbors and firefighters and police set about rescuing as many as possible, going house to house in boats running on gasoline siphoned from cars and trucks. A coast guardsman tears up at the memory of carrying a baby in her bare arms as they were winched into a helicopter. And then we descend into a catalog of institutional failures — of governance, of communication, of commitment, of nerve, of common sense, of service, of the media, which, camped in the unflooded French Quarter or watching from afar, repeated rumors as fact, helping create a climate of fear. (Bill O'Reilly, then still sitting pretty at Fox News, suggests looters should be shot dead.) More people escaping the flood arrive at the Superdome, where the bathrooms and the air conditioning don't work, there's no food or water and people suffer in the August heat, waiting for days to be evacuated. Instead, the National Guard comes to town along with federal troops, which residents of this city know is not necessarily a good thing. Many speakers here make a deep impression — community organizer Malik Rahim, sitting on his porch, speaking straight to the camera, with his long white hair and beard, is almost a guiding spirit — but the star of this show is the eminently sensible Lt. Gen. Russel L. Honoré(now retired), a Louisiana Creole, who was finally brought in to coordinate operations between FEMA and the military. (We see him walking through the streets, ordering soldiers to 'put your guns on your back, don't be pointing guns at nobody.') Honoré, who is free with his opinions here, had respect for the victims — 'When you're poor in America, you're not free, and when you're poor you learn to have patience' — but none for foolish officialdom, the main fool being FEMA director Michael Brown, mismanaging from Baton Rouge, who would resign soon after the hurricane. When buses finally did arrive, passengers were driven away, and some later flown off, with no announcement of where they were headed; family members might be scattered around the country. Many would never return to New Orleans, and some who did, no longer recognized the place they left, not only because of the damage, but because of the new development. The arrival of this and the upcoming Lee documentary is dictated by the calendar, but the timing is also fortuitous, given where we are now. Floods and fires, storms and cyclones are growing more frequent and intense, even as Washington strips money from the very agencies designed to predict and mitigate them or aid in recovery. Last week, Ken Pagurek, the head of FEMA's urban search and rescue unit resigned, reportedly over the agency's Trump-hobbled response to the Texas flood, following the departure of Jeremy Greenberg, who led FEMA's disaster command center. Trump, for his part, wants to do away with the agency completely. And yet Curry manages to end her series on an optimistic note. Residents of the Lower 9th Ward have returned dying wetlands to life, creating a community park that will help control the next storm surge. Black Masking Indians — a.k.a. Mardi Gras Indians — are still sewing their fanciful, feathered costumes and parading in the street.
The Guardian
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time review – a gripping, epic look at the New Orleans tragedy 20 years on
What makes a disaster into a tragedy? It's a question that looms large over the five episodes of this gripping and frequently upsetting series exploring the events that overwhelmed New Orleans in late August 2005. According to the community organiser and survivor Malik Rahim, the answer is simple: 'A tragedy is when we fail to do what we should be doing.' Hurricane Katrina's size and ferocity meant that it was probably always going to be a disaster. Traci A Curry's documentary explores the man-made element of the catastrophe. This isn't the first epic series to tackle this subject and it isn't quite the best. Made in Katrina's immediate aftermath, Spike Lee's 2006 masterpiece When the Levees Broke was a polemic wrenched from the soul, mining furious energy from the proximity of the event. Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time is more reflective and less visceral as those at the heart of the story now bear witness at two decades' remove. The dominant tone has shifted from anger to resigned sadness. All the same, it still packs a powerful punch. Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time tells its story in linear fashion, as if laying out a legal prosecution case. First, it shows that there was no excuse for the city to be as unprepared as it was. New Orleans actually got lucky with Katrina. The eye of the storm just missed the city. However, as the documentary explains, the area had, over decades, reduced its natural hurricane defences as the surrounding wetlands (which had mitigated storm surges) were diminished by the activities of oil and gas companies. An enormous storm had been war-gamed a year earlier and for weeks before Katrina hit, the imminent arrival of 'the big one' had been recognised as inevitable. Lucrece Phillips, a survivor who is lucidly eloquent throughout, remembers 'a quiet calmness that was deafening'. The authorities apparently shared that calmness; we watch preparations that seem to involve telling everyone to leave, making plans to open up the Superdome stadium to stragglers and winging it from there. So began the process of turning disaster into tragedy. The scenes in and around the Superdome are shocking in their itemisation of American racial polarisation. Shelton Alexander wound up there with his brother. 'It's just a sea of Black folks,' he observed. Whatever the intentions behind the opening of the Superdome, as we witness conditions worsen and the authorities' response become increasingly heavy-handed, it's impossible to see the situation as anything other than poor Black Americans being neglected, disregarded and pushed around by white Americans. Gen Russel Honoré, who was commander of the relief taskforce, recalls having to tell soldiers to stop waving their guns, reminding them that they were there to help, not intimidate. Eventually, what emerges is a perfect storm; the series is a devastatingly precise illustration of systemic failure, political impotence and media distortion. Irresponsible reporting started to negatively affect the quality of the response – drivers of emergency vehicles became reluctant to venture into the Superdome due to repeated suggestions that the building was essentially a deadly riot zone rather than simply a holding pen full of desperate people. Black people who 'escaped' from their designated areas risked being shot by white vigilantes – at least five people lost their lives that way. At the time, Katrina was widely regarded as a decisive moment; a disaster that held up a mirror to a society that didn't like what it saw. It tainted the final term of George W Bush (who incidentally gets off very lightly in this documentary, really only seen as he impotently flies over the area). It helped to usher in the presidency of Barack Obama. But viewed from the perspective of 2025, it looks like a series of early warnings that weren't heeded. Subsequently, the horror has been parlayed into an opportunity for some – in the final episode, we're shown a gentrified and sanitised city, with Katrina survivors scattered to all corners of the country. Like Netflix's recent Grenfell: Uncovered, Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time is ultimately a story of betrayal. People largely responded to impossible situations with courage, kindness and forbearance. Stories of heroism rooted in community spirit abound. And yet, like Grenfell, there's an inevitability to it all, in the relative fates of the people who let a disaster become a tragedy and the victims of that tragedy. The ignominies kept coming. Freedom of movement within the country was curtailed. The survivors were, to their fury, called 'refugees'. Even the insurance settlements favoured rich over poor. Rightly, Rahim is given the last word: 'We are the canaries in this coalmine called America.' Eventually, Hurricane Katrina went beyond disaster and even tragedy and entered the realm of scandal. This documentary feels timely and resonant because, 20 years on, it still seems like unfinished business. Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time is on Disney+ and National Geographic
First Post
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- First Post
Benin Appoints Spike Lee & Wife As Ambassadors For African Americans In US Firstpost Africa
Benin Appoints Spike Lee & Wife As Ambassadors For African Americans In US | Firstpost Africa | N18G Benin has appointed American director Spike Lee and his wife, Tonya Lewis Lee, as its ambassadors in the US for African Americans. They are tasked with bringing people of African descent closer to their roots. The duo is expected to raise awareness among people of African origin and support initiatives that promote their ties with Benin. The agreement was reportedly finalised during the couple's visit to the country's capital, Cotonou, last week. President Patrice Talon's government said that the move will help African descendants to reconnect with their historical, cultural, and spiritual roots. Watch our video for more on the story. See More
Time Out
4 days ago
- Time Out
This New York landmark was voted one of the best places to watch the sunset
Golden hour just got a New York-sized endorsement. The Brooklyn Bridge—a true titan of Gotham's skyline—was recently named one of the top 50 places in the U.S. to watch the sunset, landing at #31 in a national ranking compiled by car rental site SIXT. The list, which analyzed more than 200 scenic spots across the country, weighed everything from TikTok searches and Instagram hashtags to Google trends and air quality metrics. While Wyoming's Calcite Springs Overlook snagged the top spot, New York's most iconic span made a strong showing—and frankly, no one does a sunset strut like New York City. Built in 1883 and long celebrated as a marvel of engineering and Gothic Revival design, the Brooklyn Bridge connects Manhattan and Brooklyn via a pedestrian promenade with some of the best skyline views in town. And when golden hour hits, it's an amber-hued spectacle worthy of a Spike Lee dolly shot. According to SIXT's data, the Brooklyn Bridge garners more than 550,000 monthly Google searches and racks up over 441,000 TikTok searches. That's a lot of people chasing sunset clout—and they're not wrong. As the sun dips behind the Manhattan skyline, the bridge turns molten gold, casting reflections across the East River and lighting up Lady Liberty in the distance. Whether you're biking across its wooden planks, catching the glow from Brooklyn Bridge Park or snapping selfies mid-promenade, there's no bad angle. And science says it's good for you: Studies show that watching sunsets can reduce stress, improve mood and even boost feelings of gratitude. While New York City didn't crack the top 10 overall, the bridge held its own against national parks, remote lighthouses and Hawaiian volcanoes. That's no small feat for a city better known for smog than sunsets.
