“Kamp Katrina” will get a great deal of attention not for what it has to say about the plight of New Orleans residents in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, but for all that the documentary refuses to discuss.

Gone are President Bush and Federal Emergency Management Agency director Mike Brown, absent are the references to malfunctioning levees and martial law. It isn’t until 120 days into the film’s footage — Christmas Day 2005 — that we see a government vehicle patrolling our heroine’s neighborhood, offering drinks and food. And while relief workers may have come around in the month before “Kamp Katrina” directors Ashley Sabin and David Redmon set up shop in this devastated landscape, 120 days feels like the right amount of time given the abandoned free-for-all we see here. No film has better captured the hourly struggle that faced ordinary New Orleans residents after their world crumbled. As one man remarks without a hint of irony, “Welcome to the new third world.”

It’s an intimacy that helps us to understand the mounting challenges facing these folks — an endless horizon of piled wreckage, lingering death, and stifling bureaucracy — and “Kamp Katrina” is affecting in all the ways that Spike Lee’s epic “When the Levees Broke” was comprehensive. If that epic HBO telefilm was a larger-than-life polemic, “Kamp Katrina” is the reserved tonic seeking to bury the politics behind stories of everyday people.

To that end, Ms. Sabin and Mr. Redmon tracked down a fascinating subject in Ms. Pearl, the New Orleans resident who one day made a remarkable offer to the unemployed, displaced, and disgruntled storm victims who lined up everyday in Washington Park for the hot meals provided by volunteers. After the volunteer operation was shut down by Mayor Ray Nagin — supposedly following complaints from the park’s neighbors (it takes a special kind of nerve to make that call and complain about the free diapers being handed out to homeless parents in the park) — organizers turned to ordinary citizens for help. Ms. Pearl, a quirky kind of gal who rotates her wardrobe almost hourly between various theatrical costumes, offered up her backyard. She’s got a small plot of land, a few tents, and running water — both cold and hot.

As captured by the filmmakers’ cameras, people start arriving at her house within hours, and Ms. Pearl and her husband present them with something of an ingenious work-life plan. They can live there as long as they abstain from booze and drugs, and as long as they prove that they have a job and are saving money for the future. Don’t have a job? No problem: Mr. Pearl has a construction business, and will gladly pay Kamp Katrina residents for their labor. From an outsider’s perspective, it looks like a win-win proposition: Secure lodging, help to rebuild the city, get paid, and build a nest egg that will help you own your own slice of a new New Orleans. For audiences who have only seen the devastation on CNN, caught by cameras attached to helicopters, watching “Kamp Katrina” is a fascinating on-the-ground case study of a single neighborhood trying to regroup and rebuild. Here, on a street that has clearly been hurt by the storm but not destroyed, a husband and wife have a rather ingenious plan to help get people off the street and onto the payroll. If this can’t work, it’s hard to imagine what else the average person could do to fill the void and blaze the way forward.

During these first few days, “Kamp Katrina” is primarily interested in the sorts of personalities who have decided to remain in New Orleans and tough it out. There’s the pregnant girlfriend and the sober boyfriend, who start the film on the level but find their way back to their addictions. There’s the delusional but harmless man who has come to New Orleans because this is the scene of the apocalypse, and he says he felt pushed here by his imaginary girlfriend, the late Joan of Arc. There’s even the woman with a glass eye, a victim of domestic abuse who believes her fate is intertwined with the survival of the city.

It’s an inspiring sight to watch them cook dinner together and set out to work together. But then day 1 turns into day 75, day 90, and day 120. There’s the “day of the dead” celebration, the Mardi Gras festivities, and Christmas, before which Ms. Pearl asks her residents to write down a holiday wish list, which becomes a heartbreaking laundry list beginning with large socks and ending with a request for toilet paper and “God’s blessing.” What “Kamp Katrina” so effectively captures is the marathon mentality required of these people if they are going to survive, despite the abandonment of the local and city governments.

Meanwhile, any real sense of this disaster’s scope is only alluded to in the background. As the group sets out daily to renovate homes, we see over their shoulders the endless sea of piled wreckage. During their drive to an abandoned grocery store in hopes of rummaging for canned food, each passenger covers his or her nose to mask the smell of the dead — an omnipresent stench that eventually leads Ms. Pearl to an on-camera meltdown. The joy of payday is muted by the fact that these men and women have nowhere to spend the cash, and the hope represented by the camp’s unborn baby is quickly lost when its mother turns to drugs and alcohol. It’s only during the end credits that we get a glimpse of the Superdome, as the beginning of a helicopter flight that records the miles-upon-miles of devastation that never made its way onto the news reports.

While Ms. Pearl and her husband disapprove of the drugs and the alcohol, they seem to understand the desperation that leads to their consumption, a desperation that is partly inspired by the likes of FEMA and the Army Corps of Engineers, but has more to do with the breakdown of civilization. “You wouldn’t believe how beautiful this used to be,” Ms. Pearl says at one point, marveling at a flower that has blossomed in her garden and looking up at the birds in a nearby tree, chirping and unaware of the wasteland they have returned to after a long winter. “Those birds, they don’t know … just keep on going.”