Newsweek: She's a 'classic Nawlins spitfire'

Spike's Katrina: After watching the city get ravaged by the storm, Lee spent a year filming a wrenching four-hour 'Requiem' for New Orleans.

Allison Samuels, Newsweek, August 21, 2006:

But the voice you'll remember best belongs to a 42-year-old woman named Phyllis Montana LeBlanc, a survivor from the city's obliterated Lower Ninth Ward and one of the rawest specimens of classic Nawlins spitfire you'll ever find. In Lee's devastating film, LeBlanc is a frequent, and frequently hilarious, presence, a fuming Greek chorus of one who still can't believe that, for nearly a week, her country left her and her neighbors for dead.

"There were two things I asked Spike when we first met," says LeBlanc, sitting in a lawn chair outside her government-issued trailer home in New Orleans—the one she finally received four months after applying for it. "First I asked him, 'Are you going to tell the whole story and make it clear that all black people aren't poor, ignorant looters?' And then I asked if I could cuss." She laughs. "When he said yes to both, I said, 'Hot damn, we've got a deal!'"