New Orleans, four months after Hurricane Katrina and the smaller storm Rita that followed it, is the starting point for Spike Lee's account of the city's flooding and its aftermath. Structured in four acts, the film moves between archival news footage of the levee breaches and floodwaters swallowing entire neighborhoods, and present-day interviews with residents who describe watching the water rise from their attics and rooftops. Lee talks to local politicians, engineers, and federal officials about why the levee system built to hold failed, and to families who lost relatives in the Superdome and the Convention Center while waiting for buses that took days to arrive. Musicians and clergy appear alongside the survivors, and the film uses their words, along with blues and gospel on the soundtrack, to carry the emotional weight rather than a single narrator. The result reads less as disaster coverage than as a record of what four months of displacement, grief, and anger looked like on the ground in a city still underwater in places when the cameras arrived.