Flow How did a handful of corporations steal our water
by Irena Salina
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DVD details
Actor: Maude Barlow, Vandana ShivaDirector: Irena Salina
Brand: Oscilloscope Laboratories
DVD: Region Code 0
Audio: English (Original Language)
Format: Color, Dolby, DVD, NTSC, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.78:1
Running Time: 84 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2008-12-09
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: Oscilloscope Pictures
Product features:
- Irena Salina s award-winning documentary investigation into what experts label the most important political and environmental issue of the 21st Century - The World Water Crisis. Salina builds a case against the growing privatization of the world s dwindling fresh water supply with a focus on politics, pollution, human rights, and the emergence of a domineering world water cartel. Interviews with s
DVD Reviews of Flow How did a handful of corporations steal our water
DVD Review: Another Inconvenient Truth
Summary: 4 Stars
This film might almost be viewed as a companion piece to Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth." It's a documentary dealing with the global dwindling of our potable water supply.
The opening of the film presents a telling metaphor. It likens our rivers and streams to the veins and arteries of a living organism. The oceans are the heart, the source that replenishes and pumps the water back into circulation through this system. "Flow" focuses on the evils its producers see stemming from the current worldwide pressure being applied by the World Bank and by big business to privatize this vast organic system. They show how privatizing water supplies and then charging poor rural villagers for the flow they once brought up free from wells - puts water beyond their means and further endangers and impoverishes them.
This is a somewhat one-sided view, and many people might find a number of points they could argue with in this presentation. For example, it's not always clear how government ownership of water sources would lead to freer, cleaner water for the needy. Another example - the film producers lament the damming of the Ganges, and imply that the Ganges was a sacred, pure, free-flowing river before these business usurpations took place. I'm not sure that was exactly the case.
Then too, sometimes the citations of the damages that have followed in the wake of business take-overs are a little vague. The film's narrator mentions all the birth defects that have occurred in a village after a business has moved into the area and used local water sources either as a dumping grounds or else preemptively as a water supply. However when the narrator is shown going into such villages, it seems she sometimes has to lead the villagers to complain about these specific results. In responses to questions about increases in birth defects, villagers only mention how they have felt "itchy" since the arrival of the big businesses.
Then like "An Inconvenient Truth," this film ends with what some might consider a slightly overwrought Armageddon scenario in which it is predicted that the desperate need for water will lead to global acts of terrorism in the near future.
However, it would be hard to argue with the film's basic premise that water, our life source, is becoming a commercialized, scarce, and increasingly endangered substance. In the process, "Flow" gives viewers rare glimpses into places around the world - into South African, Indian, and New Zealand villages, where the control of water supplies is being taken out of the hands of indigenous peoples and is being put into the hands of businesses that meter it as a commodity. All this is beautifully, poetically, and in most cases, convincingly photographed.
There are also many interesting extras on this DVD, including two 1950's schoolroom films telling how water gets pumped from its source into the homes of everyday urban users.
If you would like to pursue this subject further, I suggest you check out:
"H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness," by Ivan Illich - a profound philosophical essay put into book form, elucidating how a substance once rich in myriad individual local meanings is being commodified into world-wide uniformity.
"Bottlemania" by Elizabeth Royte - a book that traces how advertising hype convinced so many urbanites that they HAD to have eight commercially bottled servings of water a day, and that takes readers on a tour of some of the industrial operations now supplying that manufactured need.
"Progress and Poverty" by Henry George - a book making a somewhat antique, but still very cogent argument that land and all its resources (including ore and water) should be community property, forever off-limits to private speculation. George provides a lot of instruction in basic economics along the way.
"The Economy of Cities" by Jane Jacobs - a book that brilliantly demonstrates how rural indigenous cultures can be empowered, not by having massive World Bank/industrial projects transplanted into their midst - but by having intricate, vital, diverse URBAN economies fostered in their nations.
Description of Flow How did a handful of corporations steal our water
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