Water, Water Everywhere and What Is It That We Drink?

Premiering at the 51st San Francisco International Film Festival, comes this bracing examination and clarion call for the world. The operative word, quite suitably is FLOW and it's not only about water, but also capital, and the cost is far greater than oil.

Rocket fuel in the water from our taps. Sex-shifting frogs and fish on Prozac. Rivers of sewage and slaughterhouse blood flowing into sacred lakes. Children around the world dying because their families cannot afford to buy clean water from the global corporations that control it. These are among the alarming, all too real scenarios arrayed in Flow, which makes clear the resource whose scarcity most threatens our future isn’t oil—it’s water. And as Maude Barlow, Canadian water activist and author of Blue Covenant, says in the film, the crisis isn’t 50 or 100 years down the road, it’s happening now. This important documentary joins reports from scientists, researchers and human rights advocates (several of them from the Bay Area) with wide-ranging on-the-ground footage to demonstrate how access to water is inextricably and disastrously linked to the flow of capital. Snapshot case studies from Indian villages, African townships and communities in the United States portray the devastating effects of treating a life-giving natural resource as a commodity to be harvested and sold at a profit. Meanwhile, governments and the World Bank seek to address the problem of scarcity with increased privatization and colossal dam projects that will likely do more environmental, cultural and economic harm than good. At the same time, Flow finds currents of hope in successful small-scale local solutions, which often draw on indigenous traditions, and in the activists fighting an overwhelming tide of political mismanagement and corporate greed.—Juliet Clark