Last month’s Human Rights Watch International Film Festival featured “The Axe in the Attic,” a poignant and thoughtful documentary about both the natural and human costs of Hurricane Katrina. Filmmakers Ed Pincus and Lucia Small spent 60 days on the road exploring New Orleans and other parts of Louisiana, Alabama and Kentucky in their efforts to collect post-storm footage and interviews, but broke with documentary tradition by deciding to include themselves in the story. “When you’re two white northerners heading South,” they said in their directors’ statement, “remaining behind the camera just doesn’t feel like an option.”

The title of the film is a gloomy reference to those who sought refuge in their attics from the flood, but had to chop their way through the roof when the water failed to recede. The documentary itself focuses on how evacuees have had to adjust to their new environments, some achingly alien to them, as both subject and filmmaker take on such controversial topics as class, race, and the government’s failure to provide for those who have lost everything.

“Katrina brought about the largest internal migration in US history, even larger than that brought on by the Dust Bowl,” say Pincus and Small. The movie’s dual focus, they say, is “the story of people uprooted and displaced - the Diaspora of Hurricane Katrina” and “what it means to be exiled in one’s own country, with a government that is conspicuously absent.”

This new American Diaspora is explored in Pincus’ and Small’s encounters with countless displaced people - from former Lower Ninth New Orleans residents who relocated to Pittsburgh, to residents of FEMA’s largest trailer park/refugee camp ” all searching for meaning in the loss of their culture, their homes, and their family members.

A country’s disillusionment with their government and the consequences of that lost of trust, as well as the enduring ability of those who have suffered to continually face the conditions of their exile with dignity form the foundation for this film on the still unending search for home. You can by supporting long-term rebuilding efforts for communities still recovering from the storm through GlobalGiving.com