Flow: For Love of Water (2007)
Average Rating: 6.5/10
Reviews Counted: 48
Fresh: 38 | Rotten: 10
Flow is an informative, disturbing and enthralling film that highlights a criminally underreported problem.
Average Rating: 6.3/10
Critic Reviews: 16
Fresh: 12 | Rotten: 4
Flow is an informative, disturbing and enthralling film that highlights a criminally underreported problem.
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Average Rating: 3.9/5
User Ratings: 1,497
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Movie Info
Irena Salina directs this feature-length documentary about the industry and consumption of humankind's most precious resource: water. As African villages survive on potentially toxic water supplies out of sheer necessity, Salina explores how the corporate structure has come to control humanity's water supply, creating a dire situation that experts have come to refer to as the World Water Crisis. With issues of pollution, politics, and human rights all coming to a head with the issue, Salina
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All Critics (49) | Top Critics (16) | Fresh (38) | Rotten (10) | DVD (1)
Problems are addressed in a narrative progression that gets more horrendous and builds into utter despair, except for the final few words of activism and optimism.
Top CriticAll of Salina's interviews and data tell a graphic story about corporate water piracy, the complicity of governments, the burden put on the poor and the scam of bottled water. But she can't quite jam it all in and still have a film that, well, flows.
As if we didn't have enough to worry about.
Salina's film might have been stronger had it not tried to cover so many water-related issues. But there's no denying its power.
Flow makes the case against the privatization of water, which is happening in gazillions of impoverished communities around the world, not to mention North American backyards.
Far too much of the film indulges in the sort of shrill alarmism that gives environmentalism a bad name.
The documentary shows in no uncertain terms that if we continue to abuse our water supply, Earth will become uninhabitable and humankind will become extinct.
The film makes a convincing case for better oversight of public water systems, water conservation, better water treatment systems and better control of industrial pollution which contaminates water supplies.
Before ending on a somewhat hopeful note of defiant activism, Irena Salina's globe-hopping documentary is a terrifying downer.
Although meandering at times, Flow is still a serviceable documentary spouting daunting informational facts and figures about the freshwater supply threats and the perilous consequences that inevitably follow.
Educational polemical documentary.
You may never buy bottled water again after this.
Not all documentaries are solution-oriented, but this is.
The film is filled mostly with talking-head interviews and very one-sided reporting. So it's lucky that these are subjects that are extremely topical right now, and are of interest as a result.
The overarching theme here is that the Earth's freshwater supply is being contaminated, sucked dry and 'privatized' for the benefit of huge corporations that are establishing themselves as the heirs to the oil cartels.
Flow might be alarmist propaganda, but with an estimated 20 years left before California's water supply is used up, it might be time to respond to the alarm.
Channeling Soylent Green, Flow is fresh when it ties issues of supply, cost, quality, and extraction on 5 continents with the rise of giant water companies.
Your tap water might be making you sick. But your bottled water might be making you sicker, while also enabling the environmental rape of the American heartland and unconscionable extortion in the Third World.
The doomsday tone of the movie quickly becomes wearying, and after a certain point the information is simply repetitive, and thus loses much of its impact.
It is required watching, because only concerted citizen action can stop the trend.
Audience Reviews for Flow: For Love of Water
Salina builds a case against the growing privatization of the world's dwindling fresh water supply with an unflinching focus on politics, pollution, human rights, and the emergence of a domineering world water cartel.
Interviews with scientists and activists intelligently reveal the rapidly building crisis, at both the global and human scale, and the film introduces many of the governmental and corporate culprits behind the water grab, while begging the question 'CAN ANYONE REALLY OWN WATER?'
Beyond identifying the problem, FLOW also gives viewers a look at the people and institutions providing practical solutions to the water crisis and those developing new technologies, which are fast becoming blueprints for a successful global and economic turnaround.
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As a documentary, it is a little scattered and probably could have dwelled on some points for longer. It might have given a more emotional involvement if it did sit on things for longer. Still, not too much to complain about.