Writer/director Rennik Soholt’s documentary Forced Change follows four families from New Orleans displaced by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. They never came back. Soholt tells their respective stories from the perspective of what happened just after the disaster and then updates each family’s trajectory in the years that followed. Fourteen years of reporting shows the immediate and long-term impact of living through that event. Every journey of displacement takes on unique positives and negatives as these people rebuild their lives and respond to life-changing decisions forced upon them. In fact, we are informed at the outset that 100,000 people never came back to New Orleans.

The aftermath of Katrina sparked several documentaries and scripted programs that spoke to the disaster and the situation: geographically, politically, financially, and socially that set New Orleans up for the devastation the storm caused. Spike Lee covered this ground in his 4-part 2006 documentary When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts. David Simon looked at the years following Katrina in his 2010 HBO series Treme, which focused on the blue-collar Treme neighborhood struggling to rebuild.