Flow: For Love of Water (2008)

Save your money for something good and enjoyable

Highly Overrated But Still Good

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

I wish everyone would see this movie. It has one simple thesis: there is a drive to privatize water. It supports its thesis with examples and details about those examples with interviews from experts, local people impacted, and even try to involve the companies that are attempting to privatize, with images, with maps,... It also provides easy solutions to the problem of providing water to the people who need it the most. There are a few arguments that are not supported (like the one on chemicals being absorbed through our skin and such,...) by one activist. The main CEOs of those companies refuse to respond to the allegations (because they know they cannot defend what they are doing, they avoid answering the questions). It is a pretty important documentary. One of the most important doc. I have seen in years. People who criticize this doc. on form are so lame. It is not supposed to be a Hollywood movie! I doubt they have the budgets to build ramps to allow smooth filming, for instance.

I saw this at IDA- Doc week. What a gem. This is not just important environmentally, but it is important culturally and socially. Not to mention it is highly entertaining. There is actually a funny segment taken from Penn and Teller's BS show. You can see the bit on U Tube, Penn and Teller "Water Bottles". When the film shows how the poorest communities around the world are really affected by the united states water bottle consumption. I have stopped buying any water bottles since I saw this film. There is a website one can sign a petition as well, which one can sign the petition to add a 31st article to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, establishing access to clean water as a fundamental human right.

I remember a certain web page that featured "unseen movie reviews", based on the idea that, to make a review for some movies, it is only necessary to watch the trailer, and not the entire film (and sometimes, not even that)... this was the case of movies such as I am Sam or others of that kind. No doubt this is also the case of FLOW. One of the comments above stated that this movie certainly "had heart"... well this might just be the problem. Ideas such as this should not try to appeal mostly to our feelings. Also, in the broad context of the growing awareness about the supposed sad state of our planet's ecology(and especially, in regard to the main causes of this condition), this movie is anything but original... a piece about the future scarcity of water was just the next logical step. Like The Corporation, No Logo and Sicko, this is just another form of crass anti-capitalism... I expect this movie to be a big hit in France. I did not like the one-sided and blatantly biased approach to a serious subject that this movie proposed.

I saw a screening of FLOW at AFI Dallas, and it's one of the best documentaries (perhaps even THE best) I've ever seen.The film covers a lot of ground. In fact, Salina probably could have made a series of films from her research. But instead she's managed to condense it down to a very watchable hour and a half. As she said in a Q&A after the screening, she realized during her research that although there is a wide range of water problems spread all across the globe, they are all connected, and it's important to look at the big picture. And from the viewer's perspective it's also interesting to see the connections between water problems in communities in India or Bolivia where privatization is putting poor communities in serious danger and communities in Michigan where Nestle is stealing water from the aquifers without paying a penny.And, like any good documentary, this one doesn't stop just after presenting a problem; it also talks about how communities are fighting back, providing inspiration for viewers to take a stand as well. This film should be required viewing.