An environmental wake-up call
There’s Something In The Water (13+, 73 mins)
Directed by Ellen Page, Ian Daniel Reviewed by Graeme Tuckett ★★★★
The term ‘‘environmental racism’’ will probably be enough to put a few of you off reading any further. That would be a shame, not just because of every insecure critic’s constant need for the validation of actually being read.
It would be a shame because ‘‘environmental racism’’ very neatly and deftly captures a societal ill that we are all aware of, but maybe struggle to describe or understand.
Environmental racism in practice is the building of hazardous plants and waste sites near to the poorest and most voiceless communities.
In post-colonial countries, such as New Zealand, Australia and Canada, that almost inevitably means that indigenous communities suffer the most from shoddy or outright corrupt wastemanagement.
There’s Something in The Water
is Canadian film-maker and actor Ellen Page’s (Juno, Inception)
documentary about three indigenous communities near her childhood home in Nova Scotia.
One small town has seen rates of death from cancer soar in the decades since a massive and unregulated dumping site was allowed on the edge of their town.
Another ocean-side community watched in horror as the paper mill they had been told would only be pumping clean water into their harbour, then proceeded to kill every single living thing in the body of water the local people had been fishing for generations. Five decades later, the owners of the mill are still fighting for their ‘‘right’’ to pollute.
There’s Something in the Water is a well put-together, unadorned and unflashy walk through three quite separate, but horribly similar stories. Together they add up to a stark warning of the sheer insanity – which seems clearer this week than ever, oddly – of a system in which the spurious movement of some numbers on a banker’s computer screen somehow allows one group of people to poison the earth and water that another group of people rely on to live.
Much of the polluted land in There’s Something in the Water was stolen from its original inhabitants.
The descendants of those people might still live on the land, but control of it was taken from them, sometimes by musket, but more often by racist law makers and fraudulent bankers. By telling those stories, There’s Something in the Water becomes something more than ‘‘another film about the environment’’.
It is also a wake-up call and primer on an issue that is not exactly unknown here in Aotearoa.
This is a tough and very watchable little movie.
And since you’ve finished Tiger King and you still have plenty of time on your hands, you may as well give it a spin.
There’s Something in the Water is now streaming on Netflix.