When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (Season 1)

"When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts" (2006) — watch online Spike Lee's HBO documentary on iFILM. Four hours, four acts, one city destroyed.

In the last days of August 2005, the levees around New Orleans gave way. Eighty percent of the city flooded. Nearly 1,800 people died; hundreds of thousands were displaced. Lee spent months gathering testimony — from survivors still living in FEMA trailers, from officials trying to explain themselves, from musicians like Wynton Marsalis who watched their home vanish on television. Mayor Ray Nagin, activist Al Sharpton, and dozens of ordinary residents all appear on camera.

The film aired on HBO in two installments in 2006, timed to the anniversary. It took home two Emmy Awards and a Peabody. Lee isn't making a disaster chronicle — he's building a prosecution. The argument: the flooding happened because of decades of neglected levee infrastructure and a federal response so slow it exposed exactly who the government considered worth saving. Stream "When the Levees Broke" online on iFILM.