NEW HAVEN, Conn.-- Spike Lee, screening his documentary about Hurricane Katrina, urged people to vote to ensure government functions better in the future than it did after the deadly storm.

(AP Photo/Steven Senne)

Harvard University Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., left, appears with film director Spike Lee Wednesday, Aug. 23, 2006, in Edgartown, Mass., on Marthas Vineyard island moments before the screening of a segment of the four-part documentary film by Lee, 'When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts.' Lee's film is airing next week on HBO and premiered earlier this month in New Orleans. The screening on Wednesday was followed by a panel discussion of prominent black professors.

Lee, who attended New Haven's annual International Festival of Arts and Ideas, showed his Peabody Award-winning 2006 HBO documentary, "When the Levees Broke: a Requiem in Four Acts."

"It was a fiasco, a mockery on the local, state and federal levels, and once again, Americans got hornswoggled, led astray, bamboozled," he said. "And too many people have died so we all have the right to vote. Never tell anyone your vote doesn't matter."

Lee faulted the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for the levees that failed to keep the floodwaters out of New Orleans.

"The damage and devastation was brought about by a breach in the levees," Lee said after the Saturday screening. "It wasn't the hurricane. It was the breach in the levees. That is the job of the Army Corps of Engineers. They did not do their job."

The documentary recounts the Aug. 29, 2005, storm with eyewitness accounts and news footage of flooding that drowned New Orleans as the levees designed to hold back the waterways surrounding the city failed.

(Copyright 2007 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)