Netflix’s Katrina: Come Hell and High Water — a testimony-driven reconstruction of a civic catastrophe

Netflix releases Katrina: Come Hell and High Water, a three-episode documentary that centers the voices of New Orleanians while parsing the event’s structural drivers—levee and floodwall failures, delayed coordination, and unequal recovery. The series integrates first-person testimony with contemporaneous video and photography, maintaining a clear evidentiary chain between individual experience and the public record. Its emphasis is not on spectacle but on legibility: what happened, to whom, and why.

Executive-produced by Spike Lee, the project is showrun and produced by Alisa Payne, with direction across the three installments by Geeta Gandbhir, Samantha Knowles, and Lee. The editorial stance is spare and procedural—eye-level interviews, restrained scoring, ambient location sound—so the narrative foreground stays on residents’ accounts and the documented breakdowns that compounded risk.

Episode one (director: Geeta Gandbhir) establishes chronology and exposure: neighborhoods as hydrologic basins, the cascading failure of protective works, and the immediate survival logics of evacuation, sheltering, and ad-hoc rescue. The cut moves between street-level footage and aerial surveys to situate testimony within the city’s geography of risk.

Episode two (director: Samantha Knowles) traces the social and administrative dimensions—mass displacement, shelter conditions, fragmented incident command—and the differential burdens borne by working-class and Black communities. Survivor narratives are interleaved with broadcast and community archive to show how resource allocation and mobility shaped outcomes.

Episode three (director: Spike Lee) addresses aftermath and return: reconstruction, cultural continuities, and the long arc of trauma. Follow-up interviews revisit sites of loss and renewal, setting present-day images against material recorded during and after the flood to examine what recovery has repaired—and what it has left unresolved.

Formally, the series upholds a public-interest documentary ethic. Claims are grounded in participant testimony and verifiable archive; the camera favors stable compositions and measured pacing; music cues support but do not sensationalize. Throughout, the filmmakers keep the causal frame clear: a catastrophic storm intersected with infrastructure vulnerabilities and institutional delay, with consequences disproportionately borne by those with the least margin for risk.

As cultural record, Katrina: Come Hell and High Water operates on dual registers: a historical reconstruction of failure and a civic ledger of mutual aid. It documents improvised flotillas and neighborhood-level response alongside policy-scale changes, restoring agency to residents while delineating the mechanisms that failed them. The result is an unsentimental, durable account built for memory, scrutiny, and instruction.

Now streaming on Netflix. Premiere date: August 27, 2025.