“This is not a film about saving the environment. It's a film about saving ourselves.... Whomever of us goes without water for a week cries blood.”

Based on the book by Canadian Maude Bellow and Tony Clarke, Blue Gold: The Fight to Stop the Corporate Theft of the World's Water, Sam Bozzo's film is part scathing attack, part provocative documentary chronicling the recent push by multinationals to commodify world fresh water supplies, regardless of the environmental, social, and economic impact. What's most shocking is how the disturbing trend has moved from seemingly benevolent water management to outright control and exploitation of a resource that some believe is a right, and others feel is a  natural resource no different than oil, coal, or timber.

How did companies like Vivendi (renamed/reinvented as Veolia), Suez, and Bechtel becomes leaders and controllers of water? How has the exploitation of water moved from a 'third world' problem to a global headache?

According to Blue Gold authors and director Bozzo, the loss and/or transference of water rights and and control of water management stems from local municipalities believing it was more cost-effective to farm out the work and avoid the heavy cost of building up the infrastructure; the UN reclassifying water as a resource and not a right; the World Bank imposing loan and funding conditions on developing countries that often mandate governments buying, building, or handing over resource-related mega-projects to foreign companies for agreed-upon debt relief; and perhaps peoples' overall naivete in believing water, as a cheap resource and civic right, was guaranteed ad infinitum – which isn't so in many countries.

If some find the film's focus sounds familiar, it's because of Irena Salina's Flow: For Love of Water (2008), which also drew from the same interview pool as well as aspects from the Blue Gold book, but whereas Salina's film was angled towards environmental horrors and people power, Bozzo's film is about the long-term impact of water control, and the tough fight that lies ahead when local citizens form the only power willing to reclaim their water rights.

It's easy to slam the film as anti-corporate, and Bozzo does show some small companies (often grass roots) dealing responsibly with water management without egregiously harming the environment, but much like An Inconvenient Truth (2006), the message is to provoke and motivate viewers into investigating who manages the water in their own communities, and how to set up safeguards. Inconvenient's effect was to create mounting unease and shock, whereas Blue Gold will undoubtedly instill outright disgust in the way local people have to fight against apathetic governments and companies like Nestle, recently charged with sucking up so much groundwater for their Ice Mountain brand that it adversely affected a local  aquifer in Fryeburg, Michigan.

Water is unique among natural resources because unlike timber, oil, coal, or minerals, we need it to live, and Bozzo argues that alone makes it mandatory to keep it controlled by local governments. There's also a simple irony the filmmaker reveals early into the film: most of France's water has for centuries been handled by private companies, but some of the cheapest, cleanest, and easily managed systems in the country lie in smaller cities like Grenoble.

That example leads into the subject of pressure tactics by companies trying to convince local governments that water management is some big, complex, financially draining thing they could do without, and yet municipally run water management in cities like Grenoble (or for that matter Toronto) offer relatively cheap water to locals - average cost of bottle water in the U.S. $2; average cost from the tap: a fraction of a penny.

Bozzo's film also addresses issues of desertification (companies sucking up so much groundwater that it mucks up an area's natural water cycle),  as well as desalinization (huge energy is required to build and maintain big plants whose output cannot satisfy the needs of a big city), and the myth that bottled water is better-tasting and more hygenic than tap water.

As a documentary, Blue Gold certainly provides illuminating examples of greed and abuse for audiences in western or highly industrialized countries that are unaware or apathetic to water's increasing position as the new oil, but the filmmakers also seek to provoke thoughts and actions, and the message of people power is right up front. Seen in its simplest form, there's bullying financially limited countries into buying high-end technology or selling water rights to foreign companies, and there's spending a few thousand dollars so a village has its own drinking well and hand pump, as Canadian schoolkid Ryan Hreljac did when he was outraged some people have no clean water to drink.

A number of deleted scenes expand on some issues, and Mongrel's transfer is very clean, with a crisp stereo 2.0 mix showing off Hannes Bertolini's minimalist score. In addition to a number of deleted scenes, there's also a straightforward talk show segment with director Sam Bozzo and co-executive producer Mark Achbar (The Corporation) from a Vancouver show called Urban Rush. The two men (who had only corresponded by phone and email prior to meeting face to face while attending the film's world premiere at the Vancouver International Film Festival) discuss the challenges in funding and filming a hot-button documentary, as well as the film's genesis, which stemmed from Bozzo being involved in a sequel to The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) with the original film's producer Si Litvinoff (who co-executive produced Blue Gold).

© 2009 Mark R. Hasan