"[1] The title is a reference to the blues tune "When the Levee Breaks" by Kansas Joe McCoy and Memphis Minnie about the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927.

Interviewees include politicians, journalists, historians, engineers, and many residents of various parts of New Orleans and the surrounding areas, who give first hand accounts of their experiences with the levee failures and the aftermath.

[3] In August 2010, HBO aired Lee's documentary series, If God Is Willing and Da Creek Don't Rise, which chronicles how New Orleans and the Gulf Coast area have fared in the five years following Hurricane Katrina.

[4]This documentary is Spike Lee's third, preceded by 4 Little Girls (1997), about the Birmingham church bombing of 1963; and Jim Brown: All-American (2002), about the football player.

Not being the first time that Terence Blanchard had worked as a composer for a film by Spike Lee, Blanchard had worked to create compositions of a more universal genre of jazz as opposed to New Orleans style jazz in order to reach masses of audiences to raise awareness of the results of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

It received a 2006 Peabody Award from the University of Georgia for being an "epic document of destruction and broken promises and a profound work of art" and "an uncompromising analysis of the events that precede and follow Hurricane Katrina's assault on New Orleans" that "tells the story with an unparalleled diversity of voices and sources.

These points are in line with mainstream investigations, including the bipartisan U.S. Congressional report, A Failure of Initiative, and the Army Corps of Engineers' own studies.