Irena Salina's Flow - For the Love of Water

Documentary Film about the New Liquid Gold - Water, not Oil

Nov 2, 2009

Irena Salina's documentary Flow reveals the way a handful of corporations have been controlling water for the world while exacerbating a world water crisis.

Irena Salina's documentary film, Flow: for the Love of Water, is a startling film about the way the World Bank and a few Multi-National Corporations (MNCs) have taken over the world's water. Water once flowed through the rivers and streams of the world, bringing life to everything in its path. But now those "veins and arteries" of life have been dammed, and pumped, and depleted, even as the animals and the humans along the path have suffered.

This film has a wide scope, and takes the viewer to Bolivia, India, the United States, South Africa; from the boardroom of the three major water suppliers (Thames, Vivendi, and Suez) to the barren, dry shacks of poverty left in the wake of their operations. An alarming case is well made about the danger of privatization of the natural world and the cost to all forms of life.

The World's Water Crisis is Clearly Seen in Salina's Documentary, Flow

The cinematography in this film is beautiful, both stark and inspiring, yet at times ugly and harsh. The ways in which the decimation of water has impacted the world in the last few decades is clearly visible in the footage of the various continents shown in the documentary. Whether it is a pay-to-pump water in an impoverished village where no one can afford it and still drink the contaminated river water, or the designer bottled waters served in tony restaurants, water is a basic human need for everyone, everywhere.

Although the process of bottling water has not increased its safety, it remains highly unregulated. Less than one person regulates all bottled water for the entire country in the U.S., meaning that person has other duties as well. It is less regulated than even tap water. The corruption involved in such a lucrative product, that the MNCs are taking for little to nothing, is rampant. There has been almost nothing done to give back to the communities whose water has been stolen. One man sunk a well near a superfund site and was bottling the water and selling it to the public. The unsuspecting customers believed they were getting pure drinking water, when their home tap water may well have been safer. Arsenic, chemicals, pesticides, and bacteria were found in 1/3 of the samples of water in the U.S. taken by an independent lab.

The MNCs that are Stealing the World's Water are Portrayed as Less than Saintly in Flow

In many countries, water no longer flows. Enormous dams have been erected, funded by the World Bank, which have stopped the water, devastated the surrounding environment, and displaced an estimated forty to eighty million people in the last century. The quality of life for the displaced in most cases immediately declines sharply, despite promises of clean water and electricity made by the large corporations getting wealthy at their expense. The interviews with water executives do not show a sympathetic, environmentally sensitive lot, but rather a greedy, callous, and cruel group who make millions every day and yet give nothing back to the poor from whom they steal. In some parts of the world, one in ten children die due to lack of clean water.

Even in wealthier nations, even for people who have expensive filtration systems, the drugs, chemicals and pollution in the water is getting into their bodies even as they shower. In the Seine, the fish are becoming all female, a phenomenon happening in other parts of the world, too. Atrazine, the number one herbicide and contaminant found in water, has caused demasculinization of frogs, decreasing sperm count in men, and increasing prostate cancers. There is concern, too, with the cycle of contaminated water adversely impacting fetuses who are starting out their lives, living in the polluted water that their mothers drink and in which their mothers bathe and shower.

Flow of Money Rather than Water Depicted in Salina's Revealing Documentary

In one horrific scene, the blood and open sewage from a slaughterhouse washes downstream through an industrial building site where the workers cover the stream because of the stench. In Michigan, where Nestle Corporation makes over $1,000,000 per day, the streams have become so depleted that the citizens sued them; water companies have been sued in five states. In some areas, they have continued pumping despite the almost complete eradication of waterways, and sinkholes have developed. This film is so well edited that it is like being transported seamlessly from location to location, from CEO to peasant, from scientist to politician. If you are at all interested in the environment, natural resources, MNCs, poverty or the future, you will want to see this excellent film.

The copyright of the article Irena Salina's Flow - For the Love of Water in Documentary Films is owned by Barbara DeGrande. Permission to republish Irena Salina's Flow - For the Love of Water in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.