Movies Features

On an unusually cool June morning, Vancouver filmmaker Mark Achbar has just exited the Fifth Avenue Cinemas after a media screening of Waterlife. The documentary’s effect on its executive producer, better known for having directed and produced The Corporation in 2003, is palpable.

“I sit there in tears all the time,” Achbar told the Georgia Straight at a Kits coffee shop. “I’ve watched the finished version four to five times—more, even—and it’s a very sad story. It’s a beautiful film and it’s a tragic story, and it moves me in very unexpected ways each time I see it.”

Toronto-based director Kevin McMahon told the Straight by phone from that city that people getting teary as a result of watching his meticulously shot film is “not an uncommon reaction”. McMahon’s seen the same result in audiences in T.O. On July 17, Vancouverites will get the chance to see the 109-minute movie when it opens in theatres here.

Waterlife traces the raw beauty of the continent’s mystical and vast Great Lakes, which provide drinking water to 35 million people and contain 20 percent of the world’s unfrozen surface fresh water.

Ably assisted by sweeping camerawork and music from indie and alternative acts, Waterlife provides the viewer a nondidactic reminder that water is a major part of us and we of it. However, the combined effects of industrialization, chemical runoff, pharmaceuticals in water, introduced predators, and population explosion has compromised the health of the water and the teeming fish and plankton life within it.

“Most places in the world get their drinking water from ground water, but the Great Lakes in a way is unique, in that almost everybody that lives on them gets their water directly from the lakes,” McMahon said. “So, yeah, it hits home in that sense. The child[bearing]-age women are the ones that really come out of it with tears in their eyes because they realize that this is fucking up their bodies and therefore it’s fucking up the genetics of their kids.”

McMahon does maintain clear focus on the artistic, never venturing too far into the more polemic territory of, say, Michael Moore—who also grew up near the Great Lakes.

“Part of the brilliance of the filmmaking,” Achbar said, “is that he [McMahon] manages to celebrate the beauty and the excitement and the human love of water at the same time as he delivers a lot of very important information about the damage that we are doing to it and that it in turn is doing right back to us.”

McMahon said he used about six different types of cameras to get what he needed.

“We really worked hard to try and bring the water to life and use every strategy we could think to use,” he said. “It’s beautiful. That’s what we wanted it to be. People have to appreciate the beauty of it to appreciate the threats.”

But the approach is not without its detractors. Both Achbar and McMahon readily concede there are risks associated with, say, keeping scientists anonymous and off-camera, as it invariably irks journalistic purists demanding attribution.

“The lack of attribution of scientists annoys some of them,” McMahon said. “I would say [of] the mainstream critics in Toronto, two-thirds of them loved it and a third of them kicked it about. That was their criticism: that it wasn’t straightforward-enough journalism.”

Another criticism was the presence of First Nations voices, McMahon added. However, that particular risk may have paid dividends overall. Anishinabe grandmother Josephine Mandamin, based in Thunder Bay, anchors the movie with her quiet determination. On a walk around the Great Lakes to raise awareness, Mandamin tirelessly talks of the need to respect the water while simultaneously looking at her reflection in it.

In the end, as Achbar noted, it is all our reflections staring back at us.

“It [Waterlife] doesn’t really point any fingers,” he said. “It doesn’t assign blame to anyone but all of us.”

And so far, the movie notes that government regulations have been inadequate and mostly reactive and the advent of bottled water has not made a difference.

True to his recent work delving into the mindset that has led us all to a corporatized environment, Achbar saves a final ironic laugh for how corporations affect our drinking water in ways we wouldn’t even know about.

“You think you know about the chemicals [in water], but you don’t think about that one cautionary note that the woman delivered about when you go to the pharmacy and they say, ‘Take this, but make sure you don’t mix it with this and that and that, and these 10 other things,’” Achbar said. “Well, all these 10 other things are in the water that you’re drinking.”

Think about that next time you take a sip.