Flow: For Love of Water, 2008

Hundreds of years ago Native Americans assumed that no one could own the land. It is a resource that everyone has a right to use as needed. Then the Europeans came along and changed that idea. Today we are possibly facing a similar turning point with water.

What would life be like if you had to spend 50% of your income on clean water for your family? In a world of diminishing resources, this is more than a theoretical question for some. Flow examines the future of one of our most vital resources on earth.





While it seems a no-brainer that everyone should have a right to clean water, I wish that the film had not simply taken this assumption and instead asked questions such as:

• What are the costs associated with piping clean water into small towns?
• Who should be responsible for these costs?
• Is the cost that people are asked to pay a lot more than what it actually costs?
• In areas of high pollution, who is doing the polluting and are they taking responsibility for the damage left behind?
• Everyone should be able to access clean water, but what are the costs involved in doing this?

The film poses some very important questions, but in an extremely one-sided way. Flow asserts that water has been stolen by big corporations. Perhaps this is simply a documentary that exposes how corporate fat-cats are getting rich at the expense of the poorest people on earth, but it seems that there is more to the story than that. I wish that the filmmakers had asked the question: "What are the reasons that water is so scarce for some? It is simply greed or are there larger issues at play?"

Directed by Irena Salina.


Melody's Stars: * * *


Rating System:
*****=Worth Buying
****=Worth Seeing in Theaters
***=Worth Renting
**=Worth Watching on TV
*=Worth Watching if also cleaning house or doing paperwork
0=Total waste of time
Fail=So bad it doesn't even make the rating system