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When Harry Shearer heard President Barack Obama refer to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina as a “natural disaster,” he decided to take action. The actor and writer, best known for his roles in The Simpsons and This Is Spinal Tap, had been following the investigations into the government’s handling of the hurricane, and he decided to make a documentary exposing a story virtually ignored by the mainstream media.
“This was sentimentalized, and we were shown a lot of victims and a lot of suffering, but the one question the national media never answered is, ‘Why did this happen?’ And that’s the thing I set out to do, to answer that question,” explains Shearer. His answer, The Big Uneasy, uses interviews with experts to show how the flooding in New Orleans resulted not just from a terrible hurricane, but also decades of construction and planning mistakes by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
Shearer hopes that people will come away from the film with “the understanding of what really happened in New Orleans and the understanding that New Orleans is a cautionary tale about the rest of the country,” he says. He’ll be on hand at 7 p.m. tonight to introduce The Big Uneasy and answer questions at the Denver FilmCenter, 2510 East Colfax Avenue; tickets are $15 general admission and $12 for Denver Film Society members. The film will run through June 2; for more information, go to www.denverfilm.org.
Thu., May 26, 7 p.m., 2011
