In his first film since 1981’s Diaries (1971-1976), Ed Pincus joins Lucia Small on a sixty-day road trip to meet and document evacuees who have lost their homes in Hurricane Katrina. From suburban Pittsburgh where an African American family from the Lower Ninth Ward starts over, to a condo on the fringes of Cincinnati where a single mother is raising two teenagers, to Baker, Louisiana, where a FEMA trailer park looks more like a refugee camp, they encounter amid the grief and isolation sobering examples of the human capacity for survival. More than a chronicle of devastation and displacement, The Axe in the Attic also becomes a meditation on the ethics of documentary filmmaking as the filmmakers integrate themselves into the story.