Chronogram Magazine reports that, “the Kent Film Festival, which bills itself as ‘Connecticut’s premier film festival,’ is one of the region’s best-kept cultural secrets. For four days each spring, the festival screens world-class feature films in the northwest corner of the Constitution state…(Among the films) being screened at the 2009 installment of the Kent Film Festival is Sam Bozzo’s Blue Gold: World Water Wars, based on the muckraking book by Canadian Activists Maude Barlow and Tony Clarke (Blue Gold: The Right to Stop the Corporate Theft of the World’s Water), which first brought the effects of globalization on the world’s water supply to public attention in 2002…Blue Gold will be screened as part of the Kent Film Festival, March 26 through March 28…”
In the article, Sam Bozzo, the film’s director, is asked, “What sort of solutions to the water crisis does Blue Gold author Maude Barlow call for?”
Bozzo replies, “Maude Barlow points out the larger problem is our global economic trade structure which keeps Third World countries poor and unable to build water infrastructures. These countries are forced to grow cash crops using water they themselves need, and then export these crops. However, they must pay huge tariffs in order to pay off World Bank debts which go back to World War II. So they remain poor even though they have resources. I cite Kenyan tea as an example of this. While in Kenya, I could not believe the amount of tea being exported—fields from horizon to horizon—yet they can’t build water pipes for their people. Only the surgical removal of the tumor of economic-debt-induced-blackmail will cure the patient. The key is legislation. National and international laws will bring global change. As that has yet to happen, my film shows the smaller model successes that will help pave the way. But, with Maude Barlow now at the United Nations as senior advisor on wate!
r, let’s hope that global changes will happen.”
In Canada, Mongrel Media will be releasing the DVD version of ‘Blue Gold’ on April 7.
The full interview can be read at
http://www.chronogram.com/issue/2009/3/Arts+&+Culture/Water-Water-Everywhere
