WHEN NEW ORLEANS native Kimberly Rogers began rolling her digital video camera on August 28, 2005, she spoke into its microphone: “We’re going to show y’all in New York what’s happening to us.” Though a self-described hustler, she probably didn’t quite foresee that prophecy’s fulfillment: her footage, now the narrative heart of the Sundance-award-winning Trouble the Water, opening in New York to an adulatory audience last Friday evening.

Through an impossible chance meeting (she literally grabbed their rolling camera and yelled “let me tell you what I went through!”), Rogers found this documentary’s creators, who had traveled to Louisiana to document FEMA’s lethargic, ineffective response. When she handed over her personal video camera—loaded with Cloverfield-style images of dark rising water and dead bodies—she completely changed the game. The directors could not have asked for a greater miracle: a charismatic, born storyteller with a flair for performance who happened to have hour-by-hour video record of the Katrina horror. Trouble the Water, thus, became a vehicle for Rogers, trailed by good-natured husband Scott to tell a story that encapsulates thousands of individual experiences.

What follows falls is a dark but unexpectedly uplifting melding of styles, so carefully edited that the shifts between Kimberly’s hand-cam footage and the crew’s supporting shots are undetectable. By means of a jumpy, non-linear narrative, the Rogers’ story unfolds: Kimberly began interviewing her neighbors (in the Lower Ninth Ward, just blocks from the doomed levees) a few hours before Katrina’s first raindrops fell. Her “newscaster” tone is light, confident, even defiant, as her run-down neighborhood—most of which stayed behind for lack of means to evacuate—agrees that the Lord will be with them through the storm. He has, after all, always been there before.

We all know what happens next, of course, but a shaky camera hovering over the billowing waves colors Katrina’s beginning hours a new shade of ominous. “It’s an ocean out there—you could start surfin’ in that!” Kimberly cries, incredulous, her tone no longer so resolute. News footage depicts the failure of the levees overflowing, as a montage of 911 calls loops in the background. We hear the same response from the dispatchers, repeated over and over: “I’m sorry, but no rescue teams have been sent out at this time. We’re sorry, but no rescue teams are being sent until the weather clears up.” One elderly woman cries softly, explaining that she can’t break through her roof. “Am I going to die?” The line falls silent.

It’s this sort of drama—a clear focus on the personal narrative—that make Trouble the Water so compelling, and a refreshing turn for an event so mired in a never-ending blame-tangle that the raw human drama has all but faded from memory.

Kimberly Rogers is a star born to play a Katrina heroine, all the more charming and believable for her complete unawareness of politics and her resolute faith in the Almighty. Her storytelling persona virtually runs off the screen, but her self-promotion is never selfish. As she fills the camera’s eye with her neighbors’ horrors and her neighborhood’s physical desolation, there is no sense that she is dying to upload her video to YouTube or ship it off to Ray Nagin’s office. Even her original music, some of which serves as the film’s soundtrack, is so deeply integrated into her life, faith, and family that it moves in and out of Trouble the Water as naturally as a gentle tide.

But any film about Katrina—particularly one as heart-rending as this—is necessarily a political discussion, and Kimberly’s narrative’s are loaded with half-completed political wonderings: she can’t understand why U.S. troops turn evacuees away from an abandoned military base, why her expedited FEMA check doesn’t arrive on time, or why the government seems “only concerned with fixing their French Quarter.” Her verbose musings are peppered with antipathy toward the government, but we all get the sense that it’s just something to talk about between scenes. That is, if no one’s there to help her, she is going to help herself, no question about it. It’s that spirit of individual strength—American spirit, if such a thing still exists—that balances her tendency to see herself as a victim of government failure as much as of a natural disaster.

The filmmakers were not quite content with Rogers’ flesh-and-blood politics, and felt it necessary to add a few (to their credit, a very few) ill-advised embellishments. In the moments that Trouble the Water’s creators pick to make their own statements, they tend to sound a bit like a documentarist many of them have worked for—Michael Moore. Specifically, brief clips of George W. Bush’s Katrina statements are painfully ripped from context and wedged between scenes, a classic Moore tactic, constructing a false either/or dilemma between Katrina relief and the war in Iraq. Generally, the characters’ “where’s the government?” discontent is played to obnoxious (and likely exaggerated) levels, leaving one to wonder if anyone from Manhattan to the Lower Ninth Ward still believes they can make their way—and yes, survive a storm—without the “helping hand” of government.

The truth is, a lot more could have been done to soften Katrina’s blow, and most of it could have happened before there was ever a storm on the horizon. Danny Glover, who served as an executive producer, summed it up beautifully: “[Katrina] did not turn the region into a Third World country… it revealed one.” During their brief attempt to make a new start in Memphis, Kimberly and Scott Rogers speak repeatedly of seeing, once outside, the horrible state of their previous lives in New Orleans. Seeing the rows of ramshackle homes, in this condition before a drop of water arrived, should motivate us all to wonder—were the state and local governments glibly existing with the full knowledge that levees were unsound?

But I’ve said an awful lot about politics for a film that mostly tells its story straight and, on the whole, is moving regardless of its creators’ likely political leanings. As a human drama, directors Carl Deal and Tia Lessen stumbled upon a masterpiece of the moment, a film that would never have been the same without a once-in-a-lifetime character and her colorful story. Trouble the Water ably re-opens the conversation, coincidentally just as New Orleans watches the horizon for another blow.

“Trouble the Water” is now playing in Manhattan at IFC Center on West 3rd and 6th streets. It opens in Brooklyn on September 12th at BAM Rose Cinemas, on Lafayette Avenue between Fulton Street and Flatbush Avenue.