Tia Lessin and Carl Deal’s Trouble the Water has been selected for top honors in the Documentary Competition of U.S. films at the Sundance Film Festival. Lessin was one of six filmmakers who received an OSI Katrina Media Fellowship in 2006, enabling her to complete and distribute Trouble the Water.

Altogether, OSI awarded 31 fellowships to media professionals working in print, radio, documentary photography, multimedia as well as film, to cover critical issues of poverty, racism, and government neglect that were laid bare by Hurricane Katrina.

Trouble the Water is a feature length documentary that follows the journey of Kim and Scott Medina, a young African-American couple from the Ninth Ward who survived Hurricane Katrina and brought dozens of friends and neighbors to safety. The project offers a window into how the hurricane impacted society’s most vulnerable—the elderly, the poor, the hospitalized, and the incarcerated—and examines the new underclass of “Katrina homeless.” The film follows the daily journeys of Kim, Scott, their families, and their community through the post-hurricane chaos into central Louisiana, Memphis, Atlanta, and Baton Rouge, and depicts their struggle to navigate the FEMA bureaucracy, resist eviction from temporary housing, cope with post-traumatic stress, and try to rebuild their lives in new, distant cities.

There were a record number of U.S. documentary features submitted to Sundance for consideration this year—close to 1,000—and Trouble the Water was one of 16 selected to compete for the grand jury prize.

Lessin is an Emmy Award–nominated filmmaker dedicated to producing social issue programming and amplifying the voices of those who fight injustice. She has extensive experience collaborating with nonprofit organizations and social service agencies in order to disseminate her work and expand the audience of her films. She was the recipient of the Sidney Hillman Award for Best Broadcast Journalist (2002) and a Soros Documentary Fund grant (2001) for her film Behind the Labels.