The series is adapted from the book Five Days After Disaster: Life and Death in a Storm-Destroyed Hospital. This is the best-selling book by journalist Sheri Fink, published in 2013, 8 years after the tragedy associated with Hurricane Katrina, one of the most devastating in US history. The book was a follow-up to the 2009 The New York Times article for which Fink won the Pulitzer Prize.
In the years since the book was published, the producers and showrunners of all the lines have tried to bring it to the screen. Scott Rudin bought the movie rights to the book the year it was released, but was never able to turn it into a worthy screenplay. When the rights expired in 2017, modern television genius Ryan Murphy became interested in the story.
The showrunner wanted to dedicate the third season of American Crime Story to Katrina, but abandoned the idea a few years later, citing the impossibility of subordinating the tragedy to a miniseries format. Instead, the third season of “AIP” was devoted to the scandal surrounding Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, and Oscar winner John Ridley took on the film adaptation of “Fe Days After the Disaster.”
In Ridley’s plot, he saw the anger and pain of a true story, where the unimaginable scale of human tragedy meets incredible heroism and the same incredible neglect. This ambivalence of a fiery heart and a cold-blooded mind makes Ridley’s project, for example, about the HBO series Chernobyl (some scenes literally repeat one another), in which the writers are equally horrified by the tragedy that has occurred, but pays tribute to those who fought with their lives at the cost of the consequences. paid.
But if a dozen projects were shot about the accident in Chernobyl, trying to figure out what happened, then for all the violence and pain of the disaster of hurricane Katrina, the filmmakers could not approach the topic for 17 years. There have been modest attempts at writing at times: for example, David Fincher in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button has made the fermentation of a hurricane an important background to current events. Or the movie Beating Time, where the character of the late Paul Walker tries to save his newborn daughter in a hospital hit by a hurricane.
But these were all artistic speculations, and the story needed some scale and thorough analysis. And most importantly: extremely honest and objective. “Five days after the disaster” becomes such a documentary series, in which, in the presence of impressive special effects of a natural disaster, the frames of a true documentary chronicle turn out to be the most terrible.
The plot of the show unfolds on two planes: when a hurricane hits and the characters try to survive in a devastated New Orleans, and a thorough police investigation is conducted into the extent of the tragedy’s consequences.
The main female role in the series was played by Vera Farmiga, who inherited from her unsuccessful predecessor Sarah Paulson. Farmiga, forced by the hurricane to continue caring for patients at Memorial Medical Center, the epicenter of the tragedy, Dr. She plays Anna Pou with her colleagues.
Returning to the complexity of the chosen topic, it is important to explain why this is so. A series of problems emerged in what was once American society in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and an epidemic of violence swept New Orleans due to the inadequate response to the tragedy. The reasons for this lie in the economic problems, the decline of the education system and the high level of local unemployment. And, of course, the terrible mistakes of the authorities, who, due to their negligence, could not timely and adequately deal with the consequences of the tragedy.
The latter was called to account during a live NBC fundraising telethon by Kanye West, who said that “George Bush cares about black people’s lives,” meaning that most of the population of New Orleans does. Later, the 43rd president of the United States admitted in his memoirs that this statement by the rapper was the most unpleasant and painful for him during his entire presidency.
Due to the strong increase in crime unleashed on the streets of a half-submerged city, the operation to rescue the surviving New Orleans population turned into a real failure: at one point, the US Federal Emergency Management Agency announced the suspension of the rescue. operations in the most criminalized areas of the city, which put large numbers of people at risk.
The writers of the series try to describe all these ugly sides of the tragedy with the utmost honesty, and sometimes cruelty. “Five Days After the Catastrophe” is the history of a separate, small, but terrible life of all the witnesses and participants in what happened, whose stories are finally transferred to the plane of a major film project.
For many viewers, Ridley’s series will be a test, both because of its deliberate slow pace and because of the gruesome evidence of tragedy. However, given the ongoing deterioration of the climatic and political situation in the world, the airing of such a show now seems more relevant than ever.
One of the protagonists of the series in a flashforward is surprised how everything fell apart in just five days. Americans often say that new Katrina hurricanes are inevitable, but a repeat of a tragedy like the one unfolding in New Orleans is already an election.
And if the release of “Five Days After the Catastrophe” becomes the starting point of at least some changes, then the shock treatment produced by the authors of the series will not be in vain.