Spike Lee’s follow-up to his Emmy-winning 2006 film When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts has taken a new turn with the final hour being devoted to the recent BP oil spill.

Airing on the 23rd & 24th of August on HBO, IF GOD IS WILLING AND DA CREEK DON’T RISE revisits New Orleans five years after Katrina, and will now explore the spill’s effect on the area.

I’ll watch anything Spike Lee puts his hands to, and when he gets pissed off and political you know it’s going to get interesting. Speaking at the Television Critics Association’s press tour last weekend, Lee denounced the U.S Government’s claims that 75 percent of the spilled oil had been cleared up, saying “I don’t care how many scientists BP buys, that oil did not disappear”.

Originally intending for the film to end with the New Orleans Saints winning the Superbowl, the crew had finished shooting when the oil spill happened. Deciding to continue, they went back to New Orleans a further seven times and were filming up until two weeks ago.

The film will also look at the problems New Orleans’ residents have had in returning home, and extends the locations to include displaced people in Mississippi and Texas who were evacuated and chose to remain in their new homes, and to Haiti to show the similarities in the situation there following the earthquake last year.

Synopsis:

Five years after Hurricane Katrina, director Spike Lee returns to New Orleans to see how the ambitious plans to reinvent the CrescentCity are playing out in the all-new, four-hour documentary IF GOD IS WILLING AND DA CREEK DON’T RISE. He finds a patchwork of hope and heartache in a story that is book-ended by a pair of momentous events — the historic 2010 Super Bowl victory and the disastrous British Petroleum oil spill — that changed the history of America’s most unique city once again

40Acres.com has a complete list of screening times here and the official HBO site for the film is here.

Source: Forbes