While Hurricane Katrina was wreaking havoc in New Orleans on August 29, 2005, President Bush was in Phoenix, posing for a photo-op, cake in hand, with birthday boy Senator John McCain. That lack of priority was only the beginning of the governments failure.
For filmmakers Ed Pincus and Lucia Small, Katrina was a clarion call to capture the devastation of the hurricane and the aftermath of horrible government decision-making as the largest diaspora of Americans since the Dust Bowl made its way across the country. In the weeks following the storm, Pincus and Small departed New England to head south, their travels and tales of the people they met documented in the film The Axe in the Attic. The filmmakers journey is a philosophical quandary, as well, as they each struggle with the question of how one can merely watch amid so much suffering and uncertainty while simultaneously including themselves in the film.