Latest news with #TraciA.Curry
Newsweek
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Newsweek
Almost 20 Years After Katrina, a Filmmaker Visited New Orleans. Everyone Told Her the Same Thing.
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. A visitor in New Orleans might frolic around the French Quarter, revel in Mardi Gras culture or get lost in a blues performance. When trying to track down the tastiest jumbo, it is easy to forget the trauma that meanders the Mississippi. But for residents, there is no getting away from the impacts of Hurricane Katrina, which still haunts the city two decades on. Filmmaker Traci A. Curry visited Essence Festival in 2023, a behemoth of Black American culture hosted annually in the city. She soon uncovered a startling truth, uttered by pretty much everyone in New Orleans—from Uber drivers to bartenders. "What was interesting was that all of them said some version of the same thing, which was that for those of us who come to New Orleans as visitors, it looks and feels as the New Orleans we all know. The one of our imagination. It's the Mardi Gras, it's the drinking, it's the food, it's the music. "But for us, they describe this bifurcated experience of the city—of before Katrina and after Katrina, that continues to this day," Curry told Newsweek in an interview at the London pre-screening of the upcoming five-part documentary Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time, premiering July 27 on National Geographic and streaming July 28 on Disney+ and Hulu. Anthony Andrews and Traci A. Curry during a Q&A event at the London pre-screening of "Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time". Anthony Andrews and Traci A. Curry during a Q&A event at the London pre-screening of "Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time". Lydia Patrick/Lydia Patrick It soon became clear to her that the city's recovery is somewhat surface-level. Curry's series—a five-part documentary—peels back the veneer of post‑Katrina New Orleans to reveal the lingering scars. A Man-Made Disaster Most Americans remember the mayhem when Katrina made landfall off Louisiana on August 29, 2005. Broadcasts aired stampedes of people trapped in the Superdome, overhead footage of submerged streets, and looted grocery stores. Now, the storm is memorialized as a "man‑made" disaster, noting the failure of the emergency response and the maintenance of the aging levee system that was supposed to protect the low‑lying neighborhoods from being utterly deluged. Curry told Newsweek: "So many of the things that happened during Katrina and the story that we tell were not things created by the storm. They were things that were revealed and exacerbated by the storm," noting how it disproportionately impacted poorer Black communities. A mandatory evacuation order was put in place; tens of thousands of the city's 480,000 residents fled, but more than 100,000 remained trapped. Many made their way to the Superdome, which descended into unbridled chaos as survivors were left without means to survive. Stranded New Orleans residents gather underneath the interstate following Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Stranded New Orleans residents gather underneath the interstate following Hurricane Katrina in 2005. KTVT - TV/KTVT - TV "When you're talking about class and race and, you know, all these things—so much of the reason that there were so many people left behind is because they could not afford to just because you are working class and don't have money, you are more likely to perish during Katrina," Curry added. A crowd of stranded New Orleans residents are gathered outside of the Superdome following Hurricane Katrina in 2005. A crowd of stranded New Orleans residents are gathered outside of the Superdome following Hurricane Katrina in 2005. ABC News/ABC News The Personal Stories Curry and her team sifted through hundreds of hours of footage to reframe the narrative of Katrina with humanity. Curry explained during a post‑screening Q&A hosted by Anthony Andrews, co-founder of arts company We Are Parable: "I used to be a news producer, and I understand how it goes. If you're on a deadline, you get your shot and go. If you run the same footage of one guy taking the TV over and over, that becomes the story." But she believes something more nefarious took place, too: dangerous stereotypes against Black people were perpetuated, dehumanizing victims of the unfolding tragedy. "There's a pre‑existing narrative about Black people in the U.S.—violence and pathology—that the media can easily lean into. News cycles don't incentivize a nuanced human story," she said. A military helicopter arrives to rescue stranded New Orleans residents in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. A military helicopter arrives to rescue stranded New Orleans residents in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. John Keller/John Keller The Oscar-nominated director counteracted this with personal and individualized footage. "You can either look at footage, look through hundreds of hours and see like shirtless Black men running crazy and say like, 'That's a criminal,' or you say 'that's a human being that's trying to survive' and allow that to inform the storytelling, which is what I and the team did," she explained. "You as the audience member must look into the eyes of the human being." Personal stories include that of Lucrece, a mother trapped in her attic with her children. Her daughter wrote their names on the walls, believing they were going to die. They were rescued by boat, but had to confront her haunting reality, a submerged city. Lucrece Phillips, resident of the 8th Ward at the time of Hurricane Katrina, who shared her harrowing rescue story in the documentary series. Lucrece Phillips, resident of the 8th Ward at the time of Hurricane Katrina, who shared her harrowing rescue story in the documentary series. Disney/National Geographic/Disney/National Geographic "There's a point at which she sees the body of a dead baby in the water. She says, 'Stop the boat, we have to get her.' The man goes, 'We have to focus on the living,'" Curry recalled. Lessons Learned? Fast‑forward 20 years and New Orleans is a city forever etched by disaster. The Lower Ninth Ward was completely decimated by Katrina, and today the area once populated by working‑class Black residents remains largely vacant. "It looks like it just happened," Curry said. "There's footage in the fifth episode we shot last year: block after block of concrete steps leading nowhere—houses that no longer exist. That neighborhood has never recovered." Meanwhile, gentrification has "turbo‑charged" the displacement of the original community, as rising housing costs transform shotgun doubles into Airbnbs with skyrocketing rents. Natural disasters are still having devastating effects. Before production wrapped, Hurricane Helene made landfall in September 2025, causing extreme flooding in Asheville, North Carolina. Crushed vehicles and storm debris sit along the Swannanoa River in a landscape scarred by Hurricane Helene on March 24, 2025, in Asheville, North Carolina. Crushed vehicles and storm debris sit along the Swannanoa River in a landscape scarred by Hurricane Helene on March 24, 2025, in Asheville, North Carolina. AFP/Getty Images "There were different weather events—the fires in Hawaii and Los Angeles. All very different. Katrina was singular in many ways, but we've seen the same contours: a weather event exacerbated by man‑made environmental impacts, an infrastructure unfit to sustain it, and harm that disproportionately affects the most vulnerable. As severe weather worsens with climate change, this will only continue unless we center the needs of the most vulnerable before the storm," Curry warned. Curry added that, while Katrina's impact is New Orleans‑centric, similar inequalities plague other communities—like the predominantly Black "Cancer Alley" upriver, where higher-than-average cancer rates have been blamed on factory pollution, or neighborhoods saddled with heat‑intensive data "server farms" and tainted water. "Katrina's story just has so much to teach us about related issues that are continuing to happen today. I hope people wake up," she added. Highlighting this point is footage of President George W. Bush flying over the apocalyptic scenes of New Orleans. The series cuts in near‑identical footage from 1965's Hurricane Betsy—when the Lower Ninth Ward was submerged similarly—yet that time President Lyndon Johnson came immediately, and emergency operations began at once. Curry notes that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), whose response was heavily criticized, has since learned from Katrina and adjusted policies to better serve those most vulnerable before a storm. But today the agency faces significant financial cuts, and its survival hangs in the balance as political pressures threaten to dismantle the system altogether. Yet the bigger story Curry wants to tell—decades on from disaster—is one of community. "Even in the most inhumane conditions, when all of these systems had failed and civil society broke down, these people did not lose their humanity. They held onto it, expressed it through care for one another, and used whatever agency they had to maintain the tight bonds of kinship and community that characterize New Orleans."
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.
Wall Street Journal
4 days ago
- Politics
- Wall Street Journal
‘Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time' Review: Misery and Malpractice on National Geographic
It's easy enough to schedule a 20th-anniversary commemoration of a cataclysmic event like Hurricane Katrina, and impossible not to make such an observance a lesson, a caution and, in this case, an indictment of governmental incompetence. But the fact that the five-part documentary series 'Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time' arrives in the immediate aftermath of the recent floods in Texas is more like a cosmic joke about timing: It changes how we see the narrative. It makes the story even more poignant. Was anything learned? Were remedies properly implemented since Katrina ravaged New Orleans in 2005? The convergence of evidence says no. Directed by Traci A. Curry and edited, deftly, by Jeremy Siefer, 'Katrina' is an irresistibly absorbing series, about bad planning, no planning, arrogant administrations, racism and doing emergency response on the cheap. Also, about history repeating itself because, to paraphrase George Santayana, no one learned from it the first time—Hurricane Betsy, in 1965, should have taught Louisiana all it needed to know about massive storms, we're told. The hard part for the viewer, even 20 years on, is revisiting so much misery and injustice. For those with short memories or too few years on Earth, the national embarrassment of Katrina wasn't born in the wind or even the rain, but in the collapse of the city's levees, the subsequent deluge, and the de facto persecution of the people most harmed by the storm.
Black America Web
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Black America Web
Ryan Coogler's New Series Exposes the Real Story of Katrina & America
Source: Walt Disney Company / Walt Disney Company Two decades after Hurricane Katrina drowned New Orleans and exposed deep cracks in America's disaster response and racial divide, Black Panther director Ryan Coogler is helping to tell the story like it's never been told before. The Oscar-nominated filmmaker has teamed up with Oscar-winning producers Simon and Jonathan Chinn ( Searching for Sugar Man ) and director Traci A. Curry ( Attica ) for Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time , a five-part National Geographic docuseries that brings viewers inside the storm—and the systemic failure that followed. 'This series goes beyond the headlines,' Coogler said. 'It reveals stories of survival, heroism, and resilience. It's a vital historical record and a call to witness, remember, and reckon with the truth of Hurricane Katrina's legacy.' Premiering July 27, the series opens in the sweltering summer of 2005 as Katrina barrels toward New Orleans. Episode one, The Coming Storm , sets the stage for what would become one of the most devastating natural disasters in U.S. history. But as the series makes clear, the tragedy wasn't just the hurricane—it was the government's failure to respond. Episode two, Worst Case Scenario , captures the terrifying moment the levees broke and the city began to flood 'like a bathtub.' With emergency services overwhelmed, everyday people risked their lives to save neighbors and strangers alike. Coogler, known for using his lens to amplify Black voices and lived experiences, said it was important that the story be told through the people who were there—not pundits or politicians. 'What happened in New Orleans wasn't just a natural disaster,' Coogler explained. 'It was the result of long-standing neglect, inequality, and abandonment. The people of New Orleans were left to fend for themselves.' As the episodes unfold— A Desperate Place , Shoot to Kill , and Wake Up Call —the series chronicles what happened in the days and weeks after the floodwaters rose. It is an unflinching narrative of survival and strength. Viewers are taken inside the Superdome, where thousands sought shelter in dire conditions. It shines a light on the chaos and confusion at the Convention Center, the militarized response, and the media-fueled narrative of looting that often overshadowed real stories of courage. Through it all, Race Against Time keeps its focus tight: the people who lived through Katrina. Their testimonies are raw, emotional, and unforgettable. Director Traci A. Curry brings a cinematic edge to the storytelling, with rare archival footage, urgent pacing, and cliffhanger endings that make each episode feel like a chapter in a larger American epic. Known for centering truth, dignity, and emotion in his work, Coogler said he approached the series the same way he approached Fruitvale Station or Judas and the Black Messiah —with deep respect for the lives behind the headlines. 'This is a story about community, about loss, but also about resilience,' Coogler said. 'The people of New Orleans didn't just survive—they resisted, they rebuilt, and they kept their culture alive.' The series also tackles the aftermath of the storm—how families were scattered across the country, how the city changed forever, and how, even now, the scars remain. While Race Against Time arrives 20 years after the storm, its urgency is very much present-day. It speaks to what happens when disaster meets inequality, when bureaucracy fails, and when Black lives are treated as expendable. 'This series is not just about what happened,' Coogler noted. 'It's about what we allowed to happen—and what we need to learn from it.' Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time premieres July 27 at 8/7c on National Geographic. All five episodes will stream July 28 on Disney+ and Hulu. Source: Jazmyn Summers / Jazmyn Summers Article by Jazmyn Summers. You can hear Jazmyn every morning on 'Jazmyn in the Morning 'on Sirius XM Channel 362 Grown Folk Jamz . Subscribe to J azmyn Summers' YouTube . Follow her on Facebook and Instagram. SEE ALSO
