The documentary, part of PBS's “Independent Lens” film series, follows five women in an engineering battalion — part of the first "Team Lioness" group which volunteered to accompany male combat units to central Iraq. The women have diverse backgrounds — from supply clerk to West Point grad — but all are thrown into an unprecedented military situation. A Pentagon spokeswoman told the Times, “A recent RAND report confirms that the Army and all other services remain in compliance with the DOD policy regarding the assignment of women in the military" which prohibits female troops from direct combat. But, she continues, “Women will continue to be assigned to units and positions that may necessitate combat actions within the scope of their restricted positioning — situations for which they are fully trained and equipped to respond,”

As the documentary makes clear, in this new military world, with its guerrilla warfare, there is no distinction between "combat" and the discharge of normal duties — which included searching and communicating with Muslim women. As a result, more female soldiers than ever before have ended up in combat, often without adequate training, and are suffering the same consequences as their male counterparts — PTSD and depression. Indeed, statistics from the British Ministry of Defense suggest that female soldiers are affected at a far higher level than their male counterparts. And, by the same token, therapists are not necessarily trained to help women in combat situations where they are not "officially" supposed to be. The film, which airs on November 13th, is apparently not polemical — one of the soldiers profiled says she is very much for women in combat, provided they're trained — but makes the need for scrutiny of women's roles in modern warfare very clear.

Women Soldiers Suffering From More Mental Problems [Telegraph]
Battleground: Female Soldiers In The Line of Fire [New York Times]

Entertainment Weekly:

What divine inspiration moved Kimberly Rivers Roberts, an aspiring rap artist and toweringly self-possessed woman from New Orleans' Ninth Ward, to grab her Hi8 camcorder and document the onslaught of Hurricane Katrina as it smashed up her neighborhood? And what grace brought Roberts to the attention of Tia Lessin and Carl Deal, filmmakers who, like so many others, went to Louisiana after the levees broke? Whatever the cosmic luck, the result, Trouble the Water, is essential, unique viewing: a stunning experience of the hurricane and its aftermath, rooted in immediate personal response and emotions that encapsulate the full national catastrophe.

Newsday:

Shot predominantly from the attic of their rapidly submerging house during the worst of the storm, Roberts' visual record gives us a palpable sense of impending doom. But it's only after the Robertses - in the company of filmmakers Tia Lessin and Carl Deal - return to their battered city their crime-ridden neighborhood that the true, sustained and still-unresolved damage of Katrina becomes so terribly clear.

Salon:

If possible, Roberts' movie-within-a-movie is even more amazing than it sounds. She captures a tale of courage, heroism and tragedy more thrilling than any Hollywood spectacle; one neighbor, a man Roberts and her husband, Scott, hadn't even liked before the hurricane, risks his life to save them, swimming back and forth across the street using a punching bag as a flotation device. Roberts barely knew how to turn the camera on when the storm started, and her footage is highly uneven. But you can feel her taking ownership of the situation as the catastrophe worsens, doing her own TV-news-style voice- over and alternating between establishing shots and close-ups.

The Los Angeles Times:

Kim Roberts' footage, shot with a video camera she'd bought on the street for $20 only the week before, gives a rare from-the-ground-up look at what it's like to be flooded out of your house. We watch in hypnotized horror as the waters rise so high they almost obliterate the corner stop sign, forcing the Roberts and their extended family to take precarious refuge in their attic.

Startling as that footage is, however, it takes up only about 15 minutes of "Trouble the Water." The documentary's best asset is not what Kim shot, but the woman herself.

With her buoyant, naturally dramatic personality (she ended up giving birth to a daughter in Utah just days before the Sundance award ceremony), bold, nervy Kim has the kind of intensely charismatic spirit documentary directors dream about. With her as our guide, "Trouble the Water" looks at the reality of New Orleans from the inside.

New York Daily News:

Using mostly amateur video shot by an aspiring rap artist and her husband in the lead-up to Hurricane Katrina and in the weeks after, this gripping, sometimes unstructured doc shows the devastation New Orleans residents suffered in the swirl of the storm.

Filmmakers Tia Lessin and Carl Deal utilize the footage Kim and Scott Roberts had taken throughout the disaster, showing how residents suffered, survived and came together to help when official assistance let them down. Kim especially emerges as a real voice of America, one that refuses to keep quiet about the horrors she saw.

New York Post:

As "Trouble the Water" points out, most of New Orleans' black residents have yet to return to a city that turned its back on them. When Kimberly sings, she gives voice to their pain.

The A.V. Club:

Trouble The Water is infuriating in its depiction of helpless Americans getting left behind, and uplifting in the way it shows the Roberts putting their lives together, but it's also frustrating, because it lacks some focus. It starts off being about the footage Kim shot, but she didn't shoot a lot, and anyone coming to Trouble The Water looking for an insider's take on the storm and its immediate aftermath will be disappointed to find that the bulk of the film takes place post-emergency. Even more bothersome is how Lessin and Deal keep steering away from the most persistently unsettling part of the Hurricane Katrina story, having to do with the multiple ways the rights of American citizens were taken away, by the suspicious and the well-meaning alike. Given that the filmmakers' original idea for their project stalled out due to lack of access, it's disappointing that they didn't explore that angle more. Even the generally upbeat Roberts and their friends note the promises and lies that have been exposed by their predicament. "Freedom exists," one of their neighbors says. "There's just… limitations on the freedom."

Village Voice:

The first and most gripping half of Trouble the Water, directed by Carl Deal and Tia Lessin, is essentially a first-person disaster movie—history captured in the visual grammar of Cloverfield. Driven just to get it down ("I'll be able to tell the story"), Kimberly aims her palm-sized camera at her backyard, at the neighbor passed out on his porch, at the kids laughing off the storm warnings in the street. A dog whimpers, an Army truck creeps by, the sky fades to gray, a drizzle begins. Those cunning directors who've turned shaky-cam mock-vérité into a horror-movie cliché waste a lot of effort planting such "stray" details; they don't have the thing that gives Kimberly's footage its eerie force—genuine uncertainty about what's going to happen.

New York Magazine:

As someone of bounteous hope but little (formal) faith, I found Kimberly’s religious ejaculations a bit trying. She and her husband trek north to a relative’s house in which there’s no water, and when a man shows up to turn it on, she exclaims, “When you trust in God, he sends miracles your way!” Five minutes later, the man returns, now ordered to shut the water off, and this time God goes pointedly unmentioned. But I admit that my perspective is that of a privileged New Yorker who has never had to summon comparable spiritual resources. Whatever sparked and has sustained Kimberly’s resolve is indeed a kind of miracle. The rap that she performs for the camera, “Amazing,” is just that, an explicit (and profane) account of her sordid past capped with an irresistibly upbeat refrain—a potential smash. That faith brings her and her husband back to New Orleans despite continued government neglect—even as New Orleans pours its resources into luring tourists back to the French Quarter. In one scene, Kimberly and fellow refugees line up for FEMA assistance at some kind of ranch, where a sign overhead points to Gate B—CATTLE ENTRANCE. You can’t make this stuff up. You can, however, capture it on film for all time. Trouble the Water is ineradicably moving.

Rolling Stone:

Kimberly's star power comes from the music she writes and sings, music that was almost lost in the storm. The moment in the aftermath when she finds it and raps about her feelings will knock you off your feet. At the Sundance Film Festival in January, when the film premiered, that moment got audiences standing and cheering. Never mind Katrina, Kimberly Roberts is the real force of nature. Despite the political incompetence that continues to devastate New Orleans, Kimberly and Scott went home with only positive vibes. The repair needed in their city has gotten Scott a job in construction. And Kimberly's music has attracted producers. No wonder, a glory abides in this woman's voice. "Inspiring" is an overused word in the movie business. But it fits here. Lessin and Deal have made Trouble the Water a spellbinder you do not want to miss.

'Trouble The Water' opened on August 22nd in selected theaters in Los Angeles and New York.

Earlier: Hurrican Katrina, Three Years Later: A New Memoir And An Approaching Storm [Jezebel]

The Greatest Silence: Rape In The Congo [HBO]

Related: The Greatest Silence Official Site The Greatest Silence: Rape In The Congo [Women Make Movies]

Earlier: Critics Find The Greatest Silence "Chilling" But "Frustrating"
"Here At The Hospital, We've Seen Women Who Have Stopped Living"
In Congo, They Rape Three-Year-Olds

New York Times:

There are certain kinds of art that obviously benefit from egocentricity. This kind of filmmaking almost never does. "The women of the Congo gave me a new definition of grace," Ms. Jackson says at the end of her film, as if that were the point.

The film shows the twisted layers of damage from war, twisted until the soldiers believe they must rape to win. Twisted until the viewer becomes engulfed in the twisted message of magic and enemy control and devastation. And you shout at the screen. Because the film shows you the pain of women raped in front of their husbands and children. Rammed with sticks until the uterus ruptures.

[Rape in the Congo] is a holocaust in slow motion...In the past decade, an estimated 250,000 women and girls, some as young as 4 or 5, have been raped by soldiers. In some cases, their genitals are mutilated and they become incontinent. The shame of rape is so pervasive that their husbands, and often their families, reject them. The children of rape are also shunned.

Harrowing and heart-rending and maddening and confounding...Jackson does a good job of capturing the paradoxical beauty of the setting, and she has structured her film so that even as it grows more horrible, hope glimmers.

Disappointingly, the film also shies away from larger questions. Why, for example, is rape more prevalent in the Congo's conflict than it is in Darfur's, or was in Rwanda's? And why has rape become a standard practice in these wars at all? Such questions are neither insensitive nor beyond the point. "The Greatest Silence," which won a special jury prize at Sundance, is in some ways a well-made documentary. But by treating one country's tragedy as another chapter in Africa's endless suffering, it risks selling its important subject matter short.

Congo's Horror, as Seen Through a Personal Filter [New York Times]
The Brutal Truth [Washington Post]
Film Captures Rapists And Their Victims In Congo [SF Chronicle]
Breaking The Silence In The Congo [LA Times]
Silence Deafens The Congo [NY Sun]

Earlier: "Here At The Hospital, We've Seen Women Who Have Stopped Living"
In Congo, They Rape Three-Year-Olds

My Fake Baby: Living Doll [Channel 4]