PBS's Frontline on Tuesday night (January 6) airs a documentary about post-Katrina New Orleans. The story revolves around Herbert Gettridge, 82, and his extended family. The Gettridges became part of the storm-created diaspora when their home in the Ninth Ward flooded. The collapse of the city's health care system, and the role that chronic disease and medical needs played in slowing the Gettridges' return and recovery, is one of the themes that ties the narrative together.

Filmmaker June Cross (a friend and colleague of mine—which is how I know about the health care subplot, which isn't featured in the snippets you can see on Frontline's home page) was on PBS's the NewsHour (podcast here) last Friday talking about the film, which was several years in the making. She describes how Mr. Gettridge, the patriarch and a skilled craftsman who helped break racial barriers in the city's trade unions, built his own house in 1952 on land that earlier generations of Gettridges had once worked as slaves. The house was flooded when the levees, just a few blocks away, broke, but it survived the force of the wind and the water. The family spent many months trying to restore the property, as well as other homes they owned in the ruined

City. Cross kept returning to New Orleans drawn by the story that is still unfolding. "It was impossible to not keep going back, " she said on PBS. "I really thought the city had died." It hasn't died, exactly, but the old New Orleans has not come back. Families like the Gettridges are still building whatever will eventually take its place. Sometimes, she said, as they endure layer after layer of despair, loss and betrayal, they have a "sense of being immigrants in their own country."

I avoid recommending books or movies on this blog if I've only seen snippets, but I'm making an exception for this. June spent three years traveling in and out of New Orleans. I spent one week there with her, as well as with the other journalists on our Kaiser Family Foundation media fellowship. That was enough to convince me that the story she tells will be compelling. Watch it.