“Do we have any Republicans in the audience?” asked Trouble the Water co-director Carl Deal at a screening this morning in the Landmark Center of St. Paul, across the street from the RNC. There was hardly a dry eye in the house for his Sundance-feted Katrina documentary, but only about a dozen sets of eyes in the auditorium, apparently none of them belonging to Republican delegates. Deal took care to point out that his powerful film–which uses homemade footage from before, during, and after the storm to tell the story of three Lower Ninth Ward residents–is hardly partisan (New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin reportedly walked out of a screening at the DNC). But Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN), who joined Deal onstage after the film, blamed his conservative Republican opponents for the failure of FEMA three years ago. “I just hope we can get over the idea that government’s the problem,” he said. “Government was small enough to drown in the waters of Katrina, and we all suffered for it.”