What Lies Upstream. Directed by Cullen Hoback. Sausalito, CA: ROCO Films, 2017. 85 minutes.

Thirst for Justice. Directed by Leana Hosea. Oley, PA: Bullfrog Films, 2022. 58 minutes.

Water has been among the more popular subjects of documentary filmmaking in recent years, a reflection of growing concern about issues of water scarcity, affordability, and contamination. The films What Lies Upstream and Thirst for Justice consider the significance of some of the more prominent water crises and controversies in recent American history, offering largely complementary diagnoses of the origins of the trouble while differing in important respects in the solutions they offer.

What Lies Upstream, directed by Cullen Hoback, tells the story of the 2014 Elk River chemical spill that affected 300,000 West Virginians. Viewers will recognize clear parallels with other notable water contamination events and their consequences (like the contemporaneous crisis in Flint, Michigan, which Hoback briefly profiles): a dangerous substance enters a water system; system operators are slow to alert the public, leading to unnecessary exposures and loss of trust; residents begin to connect the water to a variety of physical ailments, triggering a debate over health impacts; officials seek to restore confidence in the water’s safety in the face of entrenched public skepticism. The most obvious culprits in the Elk River case are the officials of Freedom Industries, whose poorly-maintained storage tanks leaked 4-Methylcyclohexanemethanol into the river and, ultimately, into the water system’s intake pipe. But even more appalling is the behavior of the West Virginia politicians who Hoback catches allowing industry representatives to gut legislation aimed at tightening regulation of such tanks. In this scene—the most powerful in the film—Hoback seems to have exposed the underbelly of the regulatory system, revealing with unusual clarity the insinuation of private interests into the body politic (50:10).

Thirst for Justice, too, frames the water issues it spotlights as collateral damage of the corporate pursuit of profit. Director Leana Hosea journeys to the Navajo Nation, the Standing Rock Reservation, and (like Hoback) Flint, highlighting in each case the ways in which “business interests” have compromised—or threaten to compromise—the health of local water sources and the self-determination of the communities that depend on them. In the Navajo Nation, the legacy of uranium mining continues to imperil groundwater sources, yet some still push for extraction of this ore and seek to classify nuclear energy as a “sustainable” power source. Near the Standing Rock Reservation, the Dakota Access Pipeline snakes through the Missouri River watershed, threatening spiritual as well as environmental desecration of land considered sacred by Indigenous residents. In Flint, the temporary switch of the city’s drinking water supply to the Flint River, part of an effort to facilitate a lucrative pipeline project financed by wealthy bondholders, results in residents unwittingly consuming lead- and bacteria-tainted water; as journalist Curt Guyette laments, “Capital was protected and people were poisoned. Period” (18:31).

Throughout What Lies Upstream, Hoback seems to be especially interested in the failures of government officials, who he depicts as either incompetent, compromised by institutional pressures, or relatively powerless when swimming against the tide of industry pushback. What hope the film has to offer comes mainly in the form of interventions by independent scientists—key players in both West Virginia and Flint—who use their data to pierce through official obfuscation and shine a light on inconvenient truths. Hoback misses opportunities, however, to evaluate the roles of these outsiders more critically and to explore the complexity of the positions they occupy. The film ends with the pat assertion that while there is “scientific corruption” within government agencies, “science isn’t broken, which means the system can be rebuilt” (81:43). It is not clear, however, what this rebuilding consists of, or how it is to be effected.

Thirst for Justice, by contrast, is more interested in the possibility of systemic change emerging from the grassroots level. As one interviewee puts it, “frontlines” in the struggle for water justice are “everywhere” (47:50), and Hosea traces a thread of popular resistance through each of her case studies. Like the protagonists of What Lies Upstream, the activists she profiles run into their fair share of institutional blowback, but we get more of a sense from Hosea’s film that we are witnessing a collective, and potentially transformative, mustering of forces against enemies of the water commons. Moreover, the Indigenous perspectives offered in the film help give the struggle a spiritual dimension, invoking the Seventh Generation prophecy of a united Indigenous front in a “spiritual revolution” (52:40) that will reset humanity’s relationship with water, and with the natural world more generally.

As both filmmakers realize, no discussion of these issues would be complete without consideration of the role of private power in shaping the contemporary waterscape, including the consequences of regulatory capture and the appropriate role—if any—of the private sector in environmental regulation and enforcement. Yet, while the people vs. profit motif can be compelling at times, it can also lend itself to oversimplification. For a deeper understanding, students should be encouraged to consult the more detailed scholarly and journalistic books listed below. Students may also benefit from a discussion of how local struggles over water relate to the global movement for water justice (Barlow 2019), as well as the broader tradition of Indigenous environmental thought and activism (Gilio-Whitaker 2019; LaDuke 2020). Finally, the viewer of these films cannot help but notice that those fighting on the front lines are disproportionately women, and students could be prompted to reflect upon the causes and implications of this striking fact, with reference to work on the role of women in environmental justice advocacy (Stein 2004).1

1For additional resources about the economic, racialized, and gendered politics of environmental justice, see also “Contextualizing Labor and Environmental Justice through a Transnational Feminist Frame,” published in issue 11.2 of Films for the Feminist Classroom.

Ben Pauli is associate professor of social science at Kettering University in Flint, MI, USA. He is the author of Flint Fights Back: Environmental Justice and Democracy in the Flint Water Crisis (MIT Press, 2019), president of the board of the Environmental Transformation Movement of Flint (etmflint.org), acting chair of the Flint Water System Advisory Council, and a representative of the academic community on the EPA's National Environmental Justice Advisory Council. His interests include issues of water and trust, water governance, environmental justice, and principles of engagement and collaboration in community-based research.