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Flow

Flow: For Love of Water

You won’t see a scarier movie this Halloween than this startling documentary. The best horror movies are able to make the mundane frightening, and the subject of Flow is a something so common that we take it for granted: water, as abundant as oxygen and just as vital for human life. But if you think the scarcity of oil poses problems for mankind in the next hundred years, try to imagine what is likely to happen if, as seems increasingly probable, the world’s supplies of potable water continue to diminish. That people in Africa, Latin America, and the Indian subcontinent are dying by the millions from water-borne diseases may not be news to you, although the film points out that these deaths are attributable not to the impossibility of providing water to these people but to the fact that private corporations want to make money by providing it to them. But “potable” means “suitable for drinking because it contains no harmful elements,” a definition that renders a lot of what we in the developed world drink unfit as well.

Documentaries like this, which was produced over a period of five years in locations around the world by Irena Salina, can sometimes leave you feeling overpowered, knowledgeable about a subject but helpless to do anything about it. But the political climate may be exactly right for Salina’s onslaught of information. At a time when it has been painfully demonstrated to most American that an unregulated banking system works to the benefit of no one except bankers, the time is right to stand up and oppose the privatization of water to corporations who promise to make clean water available to a populace but only if they are willing to pay for it. If nothing else, see Flow because it will stop you from ever again buying bottled water: You will feel that you have been made a fool of for buying a product that is largely less regulated than tap water. In fact, after seeing its demonstration of how Nestle pumps millions of gallons of water out of the American aquifer without paying a cent for it, only to sell it back to us with exotic names, you may never again buy a chocolate bar or anything else from them either.

m. faust


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