Entertainment

Home. It's your safe haven, your sanctuary from the world. But what happens when home is no longer home?

That's the wrenching question at the heart of Still Waiting: Life After Katrina, directed by two-time Emmy-winning Dallas filmmaker Ginny Martin. Airing tonight on KERA-TV (Channel 13), Still Waiting zooms in on one family's tragic displacement that lingers two years after an unfathomable natural disaster.

"The power of home and attachment to place, the importance and strength of family and community, and what happens when that is threatened or taken away – that's the heart of the film," says Ms. Martin by phone Monday from her Dallas home.

Ms. Martin first met fellow Dallas resident Connie Tipado shortly after Katrina struck in August 2005. Most of Ms. Tipado's extended family hails from St. Bernard Parish, so when St. Bernard flooded she offered refuge and assistance to some 150 uprooted kin.

Kate Browne

Katie Williams at the Saint Bernard Katrina Victim's Memorial in the documentary Still Waiting

Ms. Tipado's generosity and obligation to family is an inspiration. But Still Waiting, as the title suggests, is not a happy story.

As beloved family members, including her mom, Audrey May, trickle back into the parish, they settle not into their old homey community but FEMA trailers. In need of a handicapped-accessible trailer, Ms. May waits six months. Racial tensions, already high in the mostly white working-class community, grow higher as competition for jobs and assistance becomes fierce.

Then there are the intangibles, those things that give meaning to the word "home."

"They've become more isolated from each other," says Ms. Martin. "The family is used to gathering every Sunday or Wednesday night. But you have to have a home to do that. You can't gather the whole family into a little 8-by-10 trailer."

If Spike Lee's epic When the Levees Broke is a sweeping look at the systemic failure that led up to and followed Katrina, Still Waiting is the family snapshot that got washed away in the flood. There's a degree of anger at a system that allows people to languish in a virtual no man's land, but there's more sadness in the process by which a close family sees its ties frayed.

"It will never be the same, and that is what has been so heartbreaking to them," says Ms. Martin. "All along the most important goal for them was to go home. Home to them was the way things used to be, the way they've always been for generations. Now that they're back, that hope of restoring what they've always had is diminishing because the recovery process is just not happening.

Still Waiting: Life After Katrina

Tuesday at 8 p.m. on KERA (Channel 13)