Flow: For Love of Water

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water, director Irena Salina issues a wake-up call in the form of FLOW. The film relates the struggle over control of the world's water, and how concerned citizens are taking it back from corporations. Over the millennia, water has been considered not property but a birthright, a resource vital to life. Recently, of course, multinational corporations have been drilling and bottling it for profit. And, in many places, management of the water supply has been turned over by local governments to foreign corporations who charge the local population. People who can't afford the purified water must drink standing or polluted water, frequently contracting cholera or other intestinal diseases. Not only humans are affected, of course; frogs and fish are becoming genetically mutated by pollution, sometimes even changing their sex. Every bit as compelling as Al Gore's “An Inconvenient Truth,” FLOW is a call to action. The filmmakers have launched a petition to the United Nations to add the right to water to the universal Declaration of Human Rights. Water control is destined to be the ecological issue of the 21st century; go with the flow. – BB