Sam Bozzo, Director. Purple Turtle Films, Canada, 2008.

90 minutes.

DVD, $24.95, C$34.95

www.bluegold-worldwaterwars.com

In researching a sequel to The Man Who Fell to Earth, director Sam Bozzo ran across Maude Barlow's and Tony Clarke's Blue Gold: The Fight to Stop the Corporate Theft of the World's Water, and decided that his efforts would be better spent making a documentary to alert the world to the ongoing and increasing global water crisis.

The result is sort of a meld between Godfrey Reggio's 1982 documentary Koyaanisqatsi and Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. It has the frenetic pacing and gorgeous filming of the former, and the onslaught of increasingly alarming information of the latter. It's a formula that is effective, but has some pitfalls.

The film is divided into essentially four parts. The first presents "The Crisis," and provides the essentials of the water cycle and how human activity affects and is affected by that cycle. Second is "The Politics," which introduces the transnational corporate players in the privatization and commoditization of water and the popular resistance around the world to keep it's water. Next is "The Water War," a short history of the ancient and bloody history of water and the control of it. Finally, "The Way Forward," a gratifying end to the story.

The first three parts of the story are in fact where the film is the weakest by virtue of being so frenetic. At least three films' worth of information is provided in these sections, and the shortcuts in presenting the information start to accumulate and become glaring. The largest problem: many very provocative statements, like "Much of the world's fresh water is polluted beyond human use," or "Every single drop of fresh water will be privately owned and controlled," are presented without documentation and without rebuttal. In cramming so much information in, in jumping from country to country, threads are lost. When many statistics are presented they are given without qualification--are we talking about the U.S., Kenya, India, or the globe? There's often no timeframe presented--are the figures for water usage monthly, annual?

This sloppiness can set off small alarm bells in the critical viewer's mind that have the potential of undermining the larger message. Without sourcing for many of the scientific claims, you have to wonder about some of the other claims made and how that colors the film's political message. It's clear to any disinterested observer that that the large corporate interests exposed in the film--Coca Cola, Suez, Nestle, Bechtel--aren't in the water business for the public good. They see the tremendous profitability of holding the rights to one of the most basic human necessities--they can't lay claim to oxygen (though undoubtedly some corporate lawyer somewhere has been trying to work that one out), but they can water, and where they can, they will. So when the filmmakers stretch certain facts, independently verifiable facts, it weakens their case. For instance, the film implies that a handful of multinationals either own or control the water supply for some major American cities. One city they included is my own, Seattle, where they said that RWE/Thames controls the water, which is not true. Checking this claim, I found another reviewer, a freshwater expert from Oregon State University who clued into this problem, too, and called the water departments in some of the cities mentioned (Seattle, Las Vegas, New York) and determined that the claim was not true. It also delves lightly into real tinfoil territory, tying George Bush's interest in buying property in Paraguay to the Guarani aquifer, which underlies Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Argentina.

It's here where you really wish you had Al Gore and his PowerPoint slides. The water issue deserves the same kind of passionate, but very factually-based, presentation that An Inconvenient Truth provides. Interestingly, this is another area in which the film is lacking: drawing a connection between global warming and water resources. One almost gets the sense that the water people, in this case Maude Barlow, founder of the Blue Planet Project in Canada, Tony Clarke, founder of the Polaris Institute (Barlow and Clarke are coauthors of the book that inspired this documentary) and Michal Kravcik, a Slovak scientist and founder of the NGO People and Water, are in competition with the "climate change" people for who has the most critical crisis. Kravcik, in fact, argues that climate change is a result of water mismanagement, and that solving the water problem will end global warming.

On the other hand, there is tremendous inspiration in the film when it shows the stories of the water activists. Oscar Olivera is a Bolivian industry worker, who led the popular uprising in Cochabamba in 2000 against Bechtel, which had taken over their water systems as an IMF-imposed condition for debt relief. Ryan Hrejlac is a Canadian teenager who raised 470 when he was 7 years old to buy a well for an African village. He turned that one well into a non-profit, the Ryan’s Well Foundation, that has thus far raised $2,000,000 to build 319 wells in 114 counties and has provided nearly half a million African people fresh water. Then there's the Michigan Citizens for Water Conservation, a group that has been fighting a multi-million dollar law suit against a Nestle water bottling plant that would set precedent for Great Lakes water export law. There are other, smaller stories--the townspeople of Fryeberg, Maine, who take Poland Springs water, bottled from their own watershed, and pour it back into the source. Finally, there's 3rd grader Noah Cottrell in Michigan, whose story is told over the credits. He got his school district and local stores to stop selling Ice Mountain bottled water when he learned how the bottling plant was draining the local watershed.

The film also talks about the very real limits to some of the solutions that have been forwarded so far, particularly desalination which has extremely high energy costs in its current form. The same is true for water export in the form of "bagging" water, huge bladders that are filled with fresh water and towed over the oceans. The documentary in turn makes a strong case for community-based actions and solutions. These include Kravcik's Blue Alternative project, sort of a CCC that puts young people to work creating microbasins to catch and store water, slowing runoff, recharging aquifers, and restoring wetlands. It talks about cities experimenting with replacing concrete sidewalks and asphalt with cobble stones and systems that filter rainwater back into groundwater systems, rather than running off into storm drains and eventually out to sea. It shows the fascinating hydroponic farm at Epcot Center, where water is cycled from ponds growing talapia through the crops and back again. It talks intelligently about the need for agricultural reform, for growing what's sustainable in any given watershed and recognizing the limits to growth that water supply should dictate.

It talks about the very basics of living within the limits of watersheds. The simple things of low flow appliances, conservation, turning the water off when shaving or brushing teeth, or using dual flush toilets. And it demands that the viewer think about their water and "become the water guardians of the 21st century." In doing so, Helen Sarakinos, Director of River Restoration for the River Alliance of Wisconsin, gives the four questions that every person needs to think about and find the answers to:

What water is in my backyard?

What's the name of the watershed I live in?

Where does my drinking water come from?

Where does my waste water go?

If the film does nothing other than make the viewer think about the water they use every day and where it comes from, it's worth seeking out and spending 90 minutes of your life watching. If it further makes the viewer realize the absurdity of spending $2.00 for a plastic container of the stuff they could get out of their tap for something like $0.005, then it's really done its job. To that end, here are some things to think about the next time you're reaching for that plastic container of water:

• The energy used each year making the bottles needed to meet the demand for bottled water in the United States is equivalent to more than 17 million barrels of oil. That's enough to fuel over 1 million cars for a year. • If water and soft drink bottlers had used 10% recycled materials in their plastic bottles in 2004, they would have saved the equivalent of 72 million gallons of gasoline. If they had used 25%, they would have saved enough energy to electrify more than 680,000 homes for a year. • In 2003, the California Department of Conservation estimated that roughly three million water bottles are trashed every day in that state. At this rate, by 2013 the amount of unrecycled bottles will be enough to create a two-lane highway that stretches the state's entire coast. • In 2004 the recycling rate for all beverage containers was 33.5 percent. If it reached 80 percent, the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions would be the equivalent of removing 2.4 million cars from the road for a year. • That bottle that takes just three minutes to drink can take up to a thousand years to biodegrade. Sources: Earth Policy Institute, As You Sow, Container Recycling Institute.

People around the world are dying over this stuff that has landed on your grocer's shelf. This documentary really does force you to ask if the social, environmental, and political cost of paying Coca Cola, or Nestle, or Bechtel, for that water is worth it.