“Flow,” the Film
If you’re still drinking bottled water — or are in favor of more asphalt roads, lateral real estate development, and industrial farming — we’ve got a movie for you.
It’s called Flow, and like other cinematic wake-up calls, such as An Inconvenient Truth, the documentary coolly and convincingly correlates normal and accepted human behavior with the despoiling of our planet.
Oh, goodie!: another scolding from a bunch of lefty muckrakers hopelessly out of touch with real working folks just trying to hold onto a tiny sliver of the American Dream. Whether you drive an SUV or grow your own organic vegetables, whether you eat fast-food hamburgers or commute to the neighborhood co-op on a bicycle, Flow is a necessary viewing experience for everyone with a faucet. It’s time for us, all of us, to get hip. Now, not later.
Ours is a culture that encourages ignorance and destruction. When the victim of our way-of-life is potable water, attention must be paid, and behavior must be modified. Immediately.
The comfort of unconsciousness, of existing in an ignorant fog, oblivious to the consequences of our actions — and the imperatives that compel us to live as we do, acquiring and consuming ever more of our dwindling resources — allows most of us to willfully ignore the impending apocalypse that our species has single-handedly created and can single-handedly avert. Granted, it’s difficult to care about the inherent awfulness of bottled water when genuinely important events like the NFL Draft are happening (and being covered with the meticulousness and passion commensurate with Stuff That Really Matters). But when the majority of our fellow human beings, many of whom aren’t fortunate enough to live near a Wal-Mart or Costco, are doomed to constant thirst and poisoned aquifers, the moral and righteous thing to do is wake up.
We who live in the land of the Big Gulp, in a society of absurd bounty, have a hard time comprehending what’s the fuss. Flow explains. From the film’s official Website: 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 an unflinching focus on politics, pollution, human rights, and the emergence of a domineering world water cartel. Interviews with scientists and activists intelligently reveal the rapidly building crisis, at both the global and human scale, and the film introduces many of the governmental and corporate culprits behind the water grab, while begging the question “CAN ANYONE REALLY OWN WATER?” Beyond identifying the problem, FLOW also gives viewers a look at the people and institutions providing practical solutions to the water crisis and those developing new technologies, which are fast becoming blueprints for a successful global and economic turnaround.
You can read for yourself at http://www.flowthefilm.com/
