Case Study "Blue Gold: World Water Wars

Case Study for Cinema and Social Change
Blue Gold: World Water Wars




Canadian film Blue Gold: World Water Wars is a 2008 documentary film based on the 2003 book Blue Gold: The Fight to stop the Corporate Theft of the World’s Water, written by Maude Barlow and Tony Clarke.

Synopsis:

Fresh water is a precious and precipitiously dwindling commodity on our planet, due to wastage, pollution, damming, overusing it, interfering with the water cycle and using building methods that send rain runoff straight into the sea. Large water companies would like to profit off this shortage by laying claim to the naturally recurring resource, which they then charge astronomical amounts of money for; while continuing to add to the overusing and polluting problems that we are already recklessly doing. All of this political and economic manuerving is being to affect poor people very badly, and if we continue in this fashion all of us will be in serious trouble. In addition, countries are making foreign policy and national policy to protect their access to water and this has the potential to lead to all out friction and possibly all-out war, as various regions and groups argue about how much water each is allowed to take. As a result of this, activists across the globe are taking matters into their own hands and are raising awareness and fighting companies and governments to fix the current problematic water policies now in place. The movie breaks down the issues in detail, from the way we get our fresh water, to profiles of some of the fights that have and are already taking place over who controls the future of our water supply, and includes interviews with water experts and activists such as the writers of the book, ecofeminist activist and physicist Vandana Shiva, and Oscar Oliveria, one of the leaders of the Cochabamba revolt in Bolivia against widescale water privitization.

How the Movie Was Made:

Director Sam Bozzo had never made a documentary before Blue Gold, and have no intention of making one before he picked up the book. The information in the book galvanized him, however. In a 2009 interview with Blue Living Ideas, GTR: Blue Gold: World Water Wars Director Sam Bozzo (Part 1); Mr Bozzo informs us that he was actually working on a sequel to a sci-fi narrative film “The Man who Fell to Earth” when he was sidetracked:

When I um, I mean I actually did a narrative films. My background at film school and short films. And I was writing a script with a producer for the…a sequel to the sci fi man who fell to earth, and that’s an old sci fi where David Bowie was an alien whose planet was running out of water and they came here looking for our water. And we thought we’d be clever and think about twenty years from now what if we started running out of water which seemed…you know…just preposterous to us. And Si the producer found the book Blue Gold. And I read it. And that's when I um…and like you, I was just blown away. What was actually happening, had already happened…um, was, was bigger than anything we were coming up with for a science fiction. And um, you know, that's when we put down the project. MORE

He continues on to report that luckily for him, he had just won a camera from a Kevin Spacey film contest and the book publisher had managed to lose the film rights to the book; which meant that the authors retained those rights. Ms Barlow and Mr. Clarke were quite willing to allow him the latitude to make the film, and so he set out to acquire producers and funding. Unfortunately, his funder backed out at the very last minute, leaving him on the hook for thousands of dollars in plane tickets and maxed out credit cards. On the night before he was to leave for his trip, he seriously contemplating calling the whole thing off. Fortuitously, one of his children came downstairs and asked him for water, thus inspiring him to embrace being on the verge of bankruptcy and do the film anyway. Then he got lucky. In an interview with Green Muze interview, he notes that he won another film camera from a Matt Damon film competition during the two years it took him to film and edit Blue Gold. The book's authors helped him to source two grants, which helped to ease the financial pain somewhat, though the difficulties of shooting the film did not stop there. Mr. Bozzo details the problems that he ran into as he tried to get the story filmed in The Making of World Water Wars; from having to bribe guards in Mexico to shoot footage of farmland being irrigated with river water choked with sewage, to risking life and limb to track down the story of who murdered a water-activist in Kenya, by himself, since he couldn't afford a crew. A rough edit of the film managed to net him the executive producing help of the directors of the film "The Corporation" Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbot, as well as Si Litvinoff from the film "Clockwork Orange", plus the offer of narrating services from Malcolm McDowell, also of "Clockwork Orange". After some hard editing and polishing work, they were ready to take it to the world.

Distribution, Marketing and Outreach:

I am not sure of how much money Blue Gold made back for its makers, because it appears that they never entered it into theatres. Instead, they entered into a series of partnerships with various people and organizations and proceeded to make the film accessible to as wide a variety of people in as many places as possible. Mr. Bozzo and his merry band of backers started by making the usual round of film festivals. A look at his very impressive website locates the information that the film premiered at the Vancouver International Film Festival in October 2008 in competition, which it promptly won. It also won at the European International Film Festival and the NEwport Beach Film Festival. In 2009 at a Toronto screening of the film, Bozzo met Martin Robertson of the non-profit organization Ideas in Motion. Ideas in Motion helps to promote and produce do-it-yourself documentary screenings and festivals. Mr. Robertson used to live in Britain, until he migrated to Canada in 1980 to protest then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's attempts to privatize the public water supply. He too was inspired by the Blue Gold: The fight to stop the Corporate Theft of the World's Water book and had been taking steps to raise awareness. In a interview with the Canadian newspaper, The Star he explained what happened next :Film shines spotlight on the fight for water

In 2003, after reading Canadian activist Maude Barlow's Blue Gold: The Fight to Stop the Corporate Theft of the World's Water, Robertson bundled together six films on issues raised by the book for a screening in Kyoto, Japan, site of that year's world water forum.

The screening inspired Robertson to keep promoting films highlighting environmental threats, but the momentum crashed to a halt when he was diagnosed with cancer in 2004.

He has slowly recovered and is focused on his next project: self-financing the screening of a documentary based on Barlow's book.

"I thought, `You're not going to live to use all your savings, so what can you do?'" he explains. "I want to do something useful in countries where they need help. But I'm not good at going and building schools in Africa. I can't travel well. But film can travel."MORE

Mr. Robertson offered to organize extra screenings of the film in as many countries as possible. In four months his hard work paid off and the film screened at 101 locations in 37 countries, including a giant simultaneous twenty country screening for on World Water Day on March 22, 2009. The film not only screened at film festivals, but in churches, at activist meetings, at private parties and in other venues.

In addition to Mr. Robertson's invaluable help, the markers of the film partnered with organizations such as peakwater.org and artists united for a better world. PeakWater.org describes itself as:

...a global water news aggregate, an awareness-building collective, a forum for public discourse, and an outreach organization specializing in politically, economically, and ecologically marginalized communities. All media featured on this site is compiled by a concerned team of scientists, professors, students and global citizens. Additionally, we profile localized water conservation and management initiatives to promote water literacy through NGO, governmental, and academic partnerships.an awareness building

It continue to promote the Blue Gold DVD and the book on its website in advertisements and links, and when the film was released their bloggers did posts promoting it to its readers.

It appears that Mr. Bozzo joined nonprofit Artists United for a Better World in 2010, or least that is when his documentary shows up in their Projects from our members archive. The company claims to create high quality events to raise awareness and affect our thoughts about particular subjects, and then donates the proceeds of their labor to nonprofits and causes that deal directly with the issue itself. The film is displayed on their website alongside several others.


Executive producer Mark Achbar did some crosspromotion with his film The Corporation, by giving Blue Gold The Corporation's Stamp of Approval and they sell the DVD in their Canadian web store, though not in their US web store, interestingly enough.

Then they did a lot of press. They put up an interesting and conveniently set up Blue Gold: World Water Wars website. That website includes links to a presskit and lo-res photos and banners as well as the rather long trailer:

Blue Gold : World Water Wars


which makes full use from executive producers' Achbar and Litvinoff's previous work "The Corporation" and "The Man Who Fell To Earth" in order to encourage their fans from those films to see this collaboration.

They also have links to Facebook (with currently over 8000 likes) and Twitter (currently over 300 followers), which are still regularly updated with water news from around the world. Methods of watching the film are conveniently located at the top of the webpage, ranging from a link for buying the DVD to watching the film on Itunes, Netflix and Amazon Demand, as well as on the Sundance Channel. Clicking on the Contact link reveals which companies are distributing the film. World TV and Educational rights belong to Filmoption International Inc., a Canadian company. US video and digital rights were bought by PBS video. Their worldwide sales agent theatrical and home video sales agent is Wonderphil Productions, based in California, and Canadian rights belong to a company with the rather unprepossessing name of Mongrel Media.

In addition, the website contains a wide selection of newspaper reportage links, and a click at Water News shows the curious visitor four tv film clips and the links to facebook and twitter.

The link The Action Plan offers a great many ways for fired-up would-be activists to start doing something to help, from working on decommissioning damns to boycotting bottled water, to supporting local farming; and much more.

Finally, a click on the DVD link offers the many ways in which one can acquire the DVD of the film.



In addition to 2008, Mr. Bozzo got himself a youtube account and placed the trailer there. It has gathered of this viewing over 154, 000 views. Throughout the years, he has occasionally uploaded new clips from the movie, including about six deleted scenes in 2010, like this one detailing the brewing water trouble in Mexico:

BLUE GOLD - DELETED SCENES - MEXICAN CARAVAN



Audience Reaction and Film's Effect:

Mr. Bozzo himself mentioned in The Making of the World Water Wars that his audiences seemed to contain "least one person afterward who is so shocked and moved by the film that I can see they are forever changed, as I was in making the film. I believe that is the most rewarding experience any filmmaker can achieve. The film’s theatrical release in Tokyo, Japan was perhaps the most professionally rewarding, as I was interviewed by nineteen reporters in four days and saw firsthand how a country, not yet exposed to the film, received information about such a vital topic." A great many of the news clipping he links to on his site use commentary that indicates that the reporter feels that the film will be life changing to those who watch it. In fact, Mr. Bozzo reports that it was audience pressure that made him put up the Action Plan link on his website, and of course, the story of Mr. Martin Robertson's reaction to the film has already been told in the distribution section. Mr. Bozzo's activism on the films issues continue as well, as he sends out a Water Issues Newsletter and keeps raising awareness on his Facebook and Twitter about issues that were covered in Blue Gold. As an audience member myself, I can report that the film solidified my own inclinations towards activism on this front, and I have been raising awareness in my own quarters. I am also planning to screen the film here at Stephens next term as an awareness raising exercise coupled with using the Action Plan in order to encourage the audience to also do something in reaction to the film.

The biggest reported action directly influenced by the film, however, was reported by the Coast Magazine in August of 2010: Water Wars:An Irvine filmmaker's documentary about water rights becomes an arsenal in grassroots efforts to battle water privatization.

Apparently, the city council of the town of Marion, Indiana started debate on whether or not to privatize public utilities water in order to get more money for their budget. Residents who were not enamored of this idea formed anti-privatization organizers, and created a Facebook account to broadcast their annoyance. They were informed of Blue Gold's existence, which they then tracked down and requested Bozzo's permission for a free screening for their city council and fellow residents . The film convinced said city council that privatization was a bad idea. Not bad for a documentary that almost didn't get made, huh?

Conclusion

This film was hard to make, and relied on hard work, jumping off into the unknown with faith that it would work out on Mr Bozzo's part, perseverance and some amount of luck in that his film managed to galvanize several partners with contacts and cash who could help him with funding and distribution. The film was distributed with a focus on making it seen as by many people as possible, but outside of the theatre-release pattern system. So a combination of film festivals and partnering with organizations and private viewings and other alternative methods were used to get people to see the film. The focus therefore was not on making back the money that went into the film, but on raising awareness about the film's issues. I wish that there was more information on precisely how many people saw the film, however. I found it because I am already interested in those issues of sustainability and the fact that we are messing up our planet. And I am guessing that since the film uses new media like Facebook and Twitter at least some of those people will have seen the film. But I would have loved to have information about the amount of DVDs sold, for example, and how many people actually saw the film at the festivals and screenings. The information I am after is exactly how much did the film actually penetrate the mainstream culture in the US and Canada, so as to confirm if I am right about my feeling that the film was not seen or heard of outside of a relatively small group of people. The thing with documentaries like that are meant to provoke widespread change is that they need to be seen or at least known about by a huge amount of people to provoke a movement large enough to trigger the kind of fundamental changes that ist message tells the viewer is required. The most famous documentary that managed this was former Vice President Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" which was one of the drivers of getting climate change on the radar of most Americans. Of course, not many documentaries can get a narrator with that kind of high name recognition. As documentaries that tackle large and important topic continue to get made, it appears that the problems of funding and distribution will continue to require creative solutions.


Bibliography

Barlow, Maude and Tony Clarke. Blue Gold: The Fight to Stop The Corporate Theft of the World's Water. New York:The New Press, 2002.


Bozzo, Sam. "The Making of World Water Wars" Our World 2.0 March 19, 2010. Web. March 31, 2011.


"GTR: Blue Gold: World Water Wars Director Sam Bozzo (Part 1)" Green Talk Radio
Blue Living Ideas.com April 20, 2009. Web. March 21, 2011. Transcript.


Green Muze Staff. "Blue Gold: World Water Wars. An Interview With Film Director Sam Bozzo." Green Muze.com August 27, 2008. Web. March 25, 2011.


Sam Bozzo. "Past Screenings" Blue Gold.com Web. March 25, 2011


Bozzo, Sam. " Blue Gold Contact" Blue Gold.com Web. March 25, 2011

Bozzo, Sam. "Blue Gold Action Plan" Blue Gold.com Web. March 25, 2011


Liddane, Lisa. "Water Wars:An Irvine filmmaker's documentary about water rights becomes an arsenal in grassroots efforts to battle water privatization." The Coast Magazine.com The Coast Magazine. August 24, 2010 Web. March 25, 2011

"Peak Water: When the Politics of Water Produces Change In Access." Peak Water.org Web. March 25, 2011.

Robertson, Martin. "Blue Gold World Water Wars Location" Ideas in Motion.com Web. March 25, 2011


"The Company: Artists for a Better World" Artists for a Better World.com Web. March 25, 2011


Wallace, Kenyon. "Film Shines Spotlight on the Fight for Water" The Star.com. The Star. Jan 30, 2009 Web. March 25, 2011.