Wade in the Water, Children 2007

Through a passionate mixture of private videos, uncensored interviews and school-day adventures, the children of New Orleans' notoriously violent Central City neighborhood have created a riveting portrait of childhood at the heart of an ongoing American crisis. No one set out to make a film: six months after Katrina, filmmakers Elizabeth Wood and Gabriel Nussbaum moved to New Orleans with a free art program, devised to help students creatively express their thoughts in response to the chaos of the storm. Their documentary-filmmaking class at Singleton Charter School at the local YMCA invited students to take video cameras home, and tell their stories on their own terms. The results quickly transcended the classroom.