About the time she was finished editing the documentary “Kamp Katrina,” whittling down months of raw footage into a 90-minute film about the aftermath of the disaster that befell the Gulf Coast in 2005, co-director Ashley Sabin said she was well aware of the Katrina backlash that had already swept across the country. Americans were not just sad, they were angry at a government that moved too slowly to respond to one of the most devastating crises in the nation’s history.

But what she wasn’t expecting was the counter-backlash that was waiting for her and her film within that outraged core of Americans. As she and collaborator David Redmon started screening “Kamp Katrina,” which focuses tightly on a small group of New Orleans residents banding together in the weeks after the catastrophe, Ms. Sabin was shocked to encounter a blowback from viewers who claimed the filmmakers missed “the real politics” of the disaster.

“People go in, and see a movie with ‘Katrina’ in the title and expect politics, about how the officials, both federal and local, failed, and all I can say is, ‘Go watch Spike Lee’s film,'” Ms. Sabin said on the phone from her Brooklyn home, referring to Mr. Lee’s documentary “When the Levees Broke.” “Politics, as far as I’m concerned, is in the everyday. It’s in the decisions that these people made to stay and try their best, in the way they struggled to rebuild. This isn’t about how President Bush failed, because that’s obvious; for us, the most interesting and different way to tell the story was the day-to-day.”

So for six months, the duo dropped anchor in New Orleans and set up their cameras, not sure if they would capture a story worth telling, nor footage worth screening. Ms. Sabin said the project came to them in the form of a phone call while they were visiting Mexico, from Ms. Pearl, a woman they had met while working on another documentary. The city was flooded, Ms. Pearl told them, “and you better get down here.”

As presented in “Kamp Katrina,” which will make its New York premiere at the Museum of Modern Art next Thursday before beginning a special engagement at the Pioneer Two Boots Theater the following day, what Ms. Sabin and Mr. Redmon found in post-Katrina New Orleans was a complete breakdown of societal order. People were scattered about like wreckage from the thousands of destroyed homes, the only tangible assistance coming in the form of emergency relief volunteers who had set up shop in a local park. It was here the newly homeless and unemployed came each day for hot meals, for diapers, for water — until another seeming disaster struck.

“The horrifying icing on the cake came when this community center in the park, full of volunteers from private organizations trying to give people a sense of normalcy in terms of three meals a day and nursing care and clothing, was shut down by [then-mayor Ray] Nagin and his office. The deck was already so stacked against these people, and there was a moment when the film almost became all about politics — but instead I wanted to show this through the eyes of the average person, determined not to let it keep them down.”

That’s when Ms. Pearl became the star of the story. After the park was shut down, she volunteered the extra space on her lot of land, and overnight she converted her home’s back yard into an improvised tent village. Once the temporary residents had arrived, she and her husband went one step further, offering Kamp Katrina residents employment with his construction company — the chance to go out and help renovate destroyed properties while earning a day’s pay. Out of this despair, Ms. Sabin said she was amazed by what she thought she was seeing — the rebirth of a city on a micro scale.

“It was really remarkable, the way they opened up their lives and allowed us to capture the kind of daily struggle that was facing the average person,” she said of the displaced residents living in Ms. Pearl’s tent village.

But as she watched the days stretch into weeks, and the euphoria of just having shelter slide into unease about what the future would bring, she became less optimistic about that rebirth theme. “We started realizing that yes, they get paid for their work, but they have nowhere to spend the money. Even the grocery store is miles away, and for people who don’t have cars, that’s not even an option.”

Ms. Sabin said that throughout her six-month stay she was constantly confronted with troubling ironies, not just in the way that the local government closed the primary volunteer center, but in so many cases of “beautiful flowers growing amid the destruction.” Talking about the New Orleans landscape today — a report this week said two-thirds of the original population has returned — Ms. Sabin described it as a state of perfection standing side-by-side with devastation, revitalization occurring right around the corner from stagnant ruins.

Both filmmakers said they were regularly confronted with choices about how to cover the bizarre eccentricities of the city — such unusual sights as a man mowing a houseless lawn so that the city would not enforce a maximum-grass-length law and repossess his property, and the various costumes donned by Ms. Pearl, who seems to change wardrobes hourly. And both said the process of making “Kamp Katrina,” and of trying to get it screened, has left them with more questions than when they started. Accepted by several festivals in America, Ms. Sabin said her documentary has been roundly rejected from festivals abroad, and while Southern American audiences have embraced the work, it’s been relatively ignored by festivals in Northern states.

“It’s really been polarizing so far,” she said about early screenings. “People seem to respond to the film just as they respond to the people living with Ms. Pearl: If they like the people, then they like the movie. The ones who hate the film feel like we’re capitalizing on these people, or taking advantage of some of these eccentric personalities. They seem to be saying, ‘We know there are people like that, but we just don’t want to see them.’ But for those who know New Orleans, and the kind of eccentric people the city embraces, they get it. On a much larger scale, I think it goes beyond what happened during Katrina to what New Orleans was like before the storm, and why people like this weren’t taken care of.”