Fest Track On Sirk TV Film Review: WHERE THERE ONCE WAS WATER [San Luis Obispo Film Festival 2021 - Virtual]

The aspect of water conservation has long been on many people's minds but sometimes it does take a microcosm view to bring it to bear. As the Closing Night Film at the San Luis Obispo Film Festival, "Where There Once Was Water" tells a sprawling but also intricate perception of the life water leads in California but also how it can be deconstructed. There are many good outreach programs and organizations being done but the sheer scale and practices already in play make the challenge daunting. Filmmaker Brittany App focuses on her home of Central/Southern California (she is San Luis Obispo based) but the texture of bringing water to Southern and Central California is a huge logistical problem. As the population grows, so do the water needs but mother nature cannot create more than it already has. Add in the aspect of climate change and lax regulations, and there is a very real. looming crisis, if not already prevalent on the horizon. The idea is that by 2025, there will be a major world water storage. Of course the only thing that usually changes the path is money. The looming aspect of increasing water costs would definitely envision a change, but perhaps too late.

However it is seeing its human impact on the Navajo Reservation where there is no running water at points and water has to be hand-delivered in drums, that makes the crisis all too real. And on the logistics side, the looming damning in the San Joaquin Valley will look to cause even more land destruction while not adding real new water to the mix. These, of course, are some more impactful scenarios but there are also aspects like the El Segundo water treatment plant which is able to clean and reintegrate the water through a highly scientific process. But this is not enough to cover the impact for farming in the Central Valley or even part of the Los Angeles area. A much bigger effort will need to be made. The filmmaker also examines urban farming in Sacramento as well as the natural creation of soil near the Sierras to show different parts of the process that can be adjusted or need to be preserved.

The issue that App brings up is time and resources, both of which are becoming scarce. The irony is that it wil take so much money to at least stop gap some of the issues artificially, not to fix them. The film in terms of filmmaking is textured but at times visually unbalanced. App herself is a photographer so it would be interesting to see beyond the local and on the ground stories what she actually filmed versus what was integrated from stock footage. It is tricky because of budget and yet it is something that was very conscious in this reviewers mind (yet might not be the same for others). That said, the story that "Where There Once Was Water" is real. It is just a matter of how we listen. B

By Tim Wassberg