In the HBO documentary Katrina Babies, young teen Meisha Williams recollects her experience surviving the 2005 hurricane that displaced approximately 200,000 New Orleans residents. She describes the screams, the stench and the sight of a dead body on the street that made her contemplate her own mortality at too young an age. She takes a pause during the interview to fight back to tears when the director, Edward Buckles Jr, asks whether she ever spoke about these experiences. The answer is no. “Nobody really asked me,” Williams explains.
That heartbreaking moment, recorded around 2015, was a turning point for Buckles, who at the time was a teacher trained in acting and fiddling with a camera on the side. He realized he was working on something bigger than what he imagined to be a YouTube video series. “I just wanted to hear the stories of my community and my peers and bring some type of change or impact,” says Buckles. “But at that time, I didn’t know what it was. When I went into this documentary, I didn’t know that the children had never spoken about it.”
