by Insiya Rasiwala
Projecting change, Vancouver’s first “Eco Film Festival,” opened last Thursday May 8 at the Ridge Theatre in Kitsilano.

Set to screen 23 films over four days including the iconic Taking Root, the story of Kenyan Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Wangari Maathai, (pictured above), whose act of planting trees grew into a nationwide movement to protect human rights and defend democracy, the festival’s aims to provoke, challenge and educate thinking on global and local environmental issues.

“It was only four and a half months ago that we talked about creating this event” said Brady Dahmar, who with festival founding partner Linsey Nahmiache, seemed thrilled at the community support, interest and sponsorship that the festival managed to garner in its brief yet intense journey into culmination.

Judging by the screening of Flow: For the Love of Water, the festival’s opening night film, Projecting Change was off to an effective start.

In Flow, filmmaker Irina Salinas, asks the question, “is water or the access to water a fundamental human right or as various multinational corporations have been arguing for the last fifty odd years, is water simply a commodity to be sold at a profit?

The film sweeps its unflinching lens on the world, taking the viewer to Bolivia, India, China and Niger as well also casting an eye on own backyard in North America.

In each instance, Flow focuses on local issues surrounding water politics, but also highlights the commonalities in battles waged by civil communities against multinational corporations (often the same large players with subsidiaries) who cut deals with corrupt or desperate governments to access pure water, be it to sell it at a huge profit as bottled water, or even as that defiled global drink, Coca Cola.

The physical and emotional losses that civil communities endure, is huge.

One of the many poignant scenes in the film, depicts a native Bolivian woman who has watched a water company set up a dam to divert clean water to their plant, sending untreated effluent and waste via a diverted canal. This woman must now walk miles to get even one bucket of clean water.

“First they take the water away. Our roads grow dusty which makes our clothes dirty. Then they call us dirty.”

The stripping away of human dignity through the loss of community access to water is something that Vandana Shiva, an Indian Physicist and global community activist, is adamant to point out. “Water is the lifeblood of a people,” she says.

The article, Who Owns Water? by writer and activist Maude Barlow, published in The Nation in 2002, inspired Salinas to make her film. Barlow minces no words about the global water crisis.

“The earth's "hot stains," areas where water reserves are disappearing, include the Middle East, Northern China, Mexico, California and almost two dozen countries in Africa. Today thirty-one countries and over 1 billion people completely lack access to clean water. Every eight seconds a child dies from drinking contaminated water. The global freshwater crisis looms as one of the greatest threats ever to the survival of our planet.”

Here is North America, we learn about the pollution embedded in our tap water which contains high percentages of rocket fuel, toxic industrial chemicals and even prozac that make their way into our homes and possibly digestive systems.

The film also notes, ironically, that US bottled water sales currently approximate at $100 billion a year, which about three times more than experts say would be needed secure clean drinking water for developing nations.

But all is not lost. While Salinas casts her critical lens on the impact of massive industrialization projects such as the China’s Three Gorges Dam, which displaced some 20 million people, she also celebrates successful protests and movements occurring at a grassroots level such as an Indian village’s triumph against Coca Cola and the Bolivian deprivitization of water that are in turn inspiring similar protests around the world.

Ultimately, the film leaves you with a provocative understanding of the intimacy and convergence of the global issues surrounding our usage of water, along with a strong sense of awareness, action and compassion. Definitely a film to watch, over and over again.

Flow is awaiting a North American release in the Fall of 2008, with a short pre-run at Vancouver’s Fifth Avenue Cinemas.

The festival will now tour the province bringing its lineup to communities across BC. For more information please visit: www.projectingchange.ca

Read more by yoga teacher Insiya Rasiwala at yoguestyle.blogspot.com