PARK CITY — You may conclude that the glass is half empty after watching director Irena Salina's revealing Sundance documentary, "Flow: For Love of Water."
Salina received a standing ovation for her work Thursday after a packed Library Center Theatre showing of her film. She stuck around for audience questions on a wide array of subjects, including where she gets her own drinking water.
"I drink tap water," she said.
Salina spent five years on her documentary, taking her camera all over the world to explore who owns water, what chemicals we unknowingly consume in our water and how to solve problems associated with its collection and consumption.
"The world is running out of fresh water," a woman in the documentary declares near its beginning.
"Flow" is full of shockers that pop up on the screen, like how Atrazine appears to be essentially castrating or feminizing frogs and fish or that Prozac was found in the tissue of fish in a certain part of Texas. As the film's credits rolled, it was pointed out that among southwest states, a component of rocket fuel can be found in drinking water supplies.
It was estimated in the film that 500,000 to as many as seven billion people a year in the U.S. get sick just from their own tap water, noting that no accurate government records are kept on the subject.
Overseas, Salina filmed poor people in places like Bolivia and communities all over South Africa and India that don't have access to clean drinking water or can't afford the price of water being charged by private companies that have gained control of scarce supplies.
Big corporations like Coca-Cola and Pepsi, both huge water users, take hits in the film. But none get slammed more than Nestle, which won in court the right to pump huge amounts of water in Michigan and other states to sell under several different bottled-water brands, despite attempts to show the courts what critics believe is Nestle's apparent negative impact on the environment.
Solutions offered at the end of the film center around getting involved as an activist or by organizing protests and educating yourself on what matters, in particular with regard to water supplies.
Afterward, one woman stood and told Salina that halfway through the film she committed to never buying bottled water again.
E-mail: sspeckman@desnews.com