Water Shortage in the Cinema

The conflict over water is not a new one. The battle has raged on for decades. Now in our current times, that struggle only grows larger and more fractious. America has grown multi-billion industries around the plentiful flow of water for their processes. At the same time america has grown its population and therein it need for water for life itself.

Water is so essential that at one point in time oil tankers that millions of barrels of oil TO the United States were beginning to refill their holds with fresh water from the Hudson River and taking it back to the Middle East. This water was on a fast track to the open sea anyway but the Ports Authority of NY/NJ counted it as theft of US resources and wanted paid for the amount of river water thusly conveyed.

Other Middle East fresh water projects included the idea of harnessing massive icebergs in the Antarctic and towing them to a mooring location where they could be harvested for their fresh water.

Las Vegan has proposed spending over $3 billion to construct a 260 mile pipeline to bring water to their city. Even though the city is rapidly depleting its only water source, Lake Mead, the pipeline project has been held up for years in environmental reviews and permitting,

Film producers have not been quiet on the topic of water shortages and water rights issues for a long time. There are some films that are directly involved with water struggles and other merely peripherally. These films are not just examples of US strife but the entire globe.

The Milagro Beanfield War (1988) centered on one man's obsession to plant a beanfield and use water that flowed by it in an open channel. The trouble was there was a wealthy land speculator who wanted all the water for his residential and golf course project in the valley. Therein lay the conflict. The water was all allocated by powerful people who did not care about the indigenous peoples who had been on the land for generations.

Even the Rain (2010) was set in Bolivia where the water and all distribution rights were sold to a private corporation so that the capital city could continue to use water the way it wanted to do. The indigenous peoples were forcibly restrained from gathering and holding "even the rain."

Even the Hollywood movie, Chinatown (1974) was about the intrigues of the Mulholland era water management projects to make living the desert of Los Angeles possible.

As far back as the building of the hydro-electric dams by the Tennessee Valley Authority there has been contentious actions on both side of the issue. The only real argument over water rights can take place where there is water in the first place.

One might wonder what the cinema will say about the droughts that plague the people of the planet Earth 10, 20, 50 years from now. We saw the forced migration of farming families due to the 1930 Dust Bowl and its treatment in literature and film with John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath" (1940). There are other books and films that address the trials and tribulations of the shortage of water, but these four are a sampler. We may yet see our future in the recent past.