Water Rights in Fictional Film, Part I

 

Multiple films fictionalize the actual water war in documented in Bolivia, where citizens kicked out its private water companies and began a sustainable water plan. For example, Andrew Hageman examines this issue in a dialectical reading of Even the Rain (2010), and

Abuela Grillo (2009) (66) that shows parallels between these fictional films and the documentary The Corporation (2003). 

This issue is also explored in more detail in the documentary Flow: For Love of Water, which documents the 1999 water privatization in Bolivia forced by the World Bank, which excluded 208,000 people from portable water in Cochabamba. Water was returned to the people of Cochabamba in 2000 and to citizens of La Paz in 2007, according to the film. 

Although the Nairobi summit’s solutions are not discussed, and the local solutions seem limited, the multiple problems associated with water rights are revealed and illustrated well in Blue Gold and reinforced by Flow. Contemporary films in a variety of genres reflect the ongoing influence of this doctrine of prior appropriation. Chinatown (1974) most clearly draws on the doctrine, and Quantum of Solace (2008) and Rango (2011) demonstrate the doctrine’s continuing influence.