New film probes our relationship to water

In August 2009, after years of spirited protests, encampments and arrests, the proposed Dumpsite 41over the Alliston Aquifer in southern Ontario was shelved. The aquifer, which stretches from Georgian Bay to the Oak Ridges Moraine north of Toronto, is the reputed reservoir of some of the purest water in the world.

Ojibway elder Wilmer Nadjiwon, then in his late 80s, joined the protests. Having grown up on the crystal waters of Georgian Bay, Nadjiwon stated that one thing he was clearly taught as a child was, “If you destroy the water, you die.”

Nadjiwon’s insight is breathtakingly, suggestively brought to the screen in Watermark, a new feature documentary by Toronto-based filmmakers Jennifer Baichwal and Nick de Pencier and celebrated photographer Edward Burtynsky. The film is currently playing in Toronto and theatres across the country Oct. 11.

While other documentaries, such as Water on the Table (2010), compellingly tell the story of political struggles to safeguard the world’s freshwater (featuring Maude Barlow, the world’s foremost water advocate), and others, such as Thirst (2004), forcefully explore the consequences of water privatization, Watermark uses arresting vistas and gravity-defying cinematography to create a sensory aura rather than a political narrative. The film employs images more than words to create a mood as much as a message.

Filmed in 10 countries, Watermark transports us to the parched Colorado River delta in Mexico, where, like withered human veins, the dried fingers of the river no longer touch the sea. We witness the chemical-intensive leather tanneries in Dhaka, Bangladesh, where toxic streams flow from the leather works into a river where children bathe. We visit the gargantuan Xiluodu arch dam in China, the largest in the world, six times the size of the Hoover Dam. We are left to wonder, seeing the dis- sipation of the Colorado, what present and future toll the Xiluodu will have on the waters and people of the Jinsha River.

We are also rendered dumbfounded at the arresting aerial footage of drying circles of pivot irrigation in Texas. Once heralded as an agricultural miracle, these brownout crop circles represent a massive depletion of the Ogallala Aquifer, estimated to be once as vast as six Lake Eries, and underlying a 362,000 square-kilometre swath of the U.S. Great Plains. As the film intimates, imagine groups draining two of the Great Lakes and you get a sense of how industrialized agriculture is destroying such water systems.

In a recent conversation, Baichwal, who earlier collaborated with Burtynsky in the visually striking film Manufactured Landscapes (2003), noted that working together on this film in a more direct way was “very organic,” a venture in which “our strengths came to the fore naturally.” Watermark actually forms a water trilogy for Burtynsky, along with a major photographic exhibition and the book, Burtynsky: Water. For Baichwal, there is a great “capacity to shift consciousness” through a “nondidactic” approach. As Watermark attests, using art and striking cinematography to explore these issues can be both emo- tionally powerful and psychically moving — and tap a deeper space within viewers that may serve as a wellspring for political engagement. The film is framed spiritually by Tahltan linguist Oscar Dennis of northern B.C.’s Stikine River watershed and glacier ice core researcher J.P. Steffensen.

While Dennis speaks from an aboriginal world view and Steffensen from empirical science, both understand that psychically and physically, “we are all water,” and the “unbroken link” of water-based cell division has marked the cycle of life on Earth for the past three billion years. Both understand, along with Wilmer Nadjiwon, that if we break this link, if we destroy our water, we destroy ourselves. A spiritual crescendo in the film is reached with the poignant footage of Kumbh Mela in Allahabad, India, where 30 million gather for immersion in the Ganges — a pilgrimage deemed the largest peaceful gathering in the world. The sacred power of the river, alive with floating lanterns and personal oblations, is evocatively filmed, and speaks to the deep spiritual bonds with water endemic to the human family.

Films such as Watermark represent both a meditation and an invitation — and gently nudge us nearer to a collective sanity on how we treat both the source of life and ourselves.

Watermark uses arresting vistas and gravity-defying cinematography to create a sensory aura rather than a political narrative. The film employs images more than words to create a mood as much as a message