Canadian filmmaker Michael Zelniker, who will receive the Taormina Film Festival’s Special Sustainability Award on Thursday night, is on a mission to heal the damage humanity is inflicting on the planet.
Zelniker, who directed the acclaimed 2022 deforestation documentary series “Organizational Problems – A Northern Love Story” (soon to be screened at the Raindance Film Festival in London), traveled to 21 countries to make the eight-part documentary series “The Struggle for Mother Water.” The series, which premiered at the Berlinale Series Market in February, delves into the front lines of the water crisis through the prism of how women are leading the fight to protect and protect water.
Mr. Zelniker, a former actor who appeared in films such as the Canadian docudrama “The Terry Fox Story,” Clint Eastwood’s “Bird” and David Cronenberg’s “The Naked Lunch,” has recently pivoted to environmental storytelling. That’s because, he says, “There’s something really powerful about visiting areas[affected by environmental disasters]where people’s voices haven’t been heard for too long.”
Disclosure: Zelniker is married to Dia Lawrence, co-president and publisher of Variety magazine.
Below, Zelniker talks to Variety about the journey of “The Fight for Mother Water” and the impact the series is starting to have.
What’s next for Taormina?
I’m planning to go to Germany. GIZ, the German government agency that oversees international aid, invited me to the Bonn climate change conference after its senior members saw the “Struggle for Mother Water” in Berlin. Therefore, all international policymakers convening in Bonn for the climate change conference will participate in the review panel. I’m going to speak. And with me is Ewi Lama, one of the women I collaborated with in the Cameroonian part of this story, the Struggle for Mother Water. It will once again be an opportunity to try to foster some change.
What other steps have you taken since Berlin in terms of this work influencing you?
World Water Day is held every year, with a major event hosted by UN Water and UN Women at the United Nations in New York City. They invited me there and we played the series for a few minutes. They had me stand up and it was really touching. Actually, I started crying a little. Because, you know, we have this big international delegation. I’m a kid from Montreal who grew up watching hockey on Saturday nights, so I was able to be in one of the big conference rooms at the United Nations in front of this international delegation and watch my documentary screen for a few minutes and see people be moved by the work that I had somehow put together. Because I am not responsible for how deeply these testimonies move. I was simply responsible for assembling those testimonies into a coherent narrative. It was a really special day. UN Water and UN Women are currently planning a series of events using the documentary during the year.
Are there other ways this series is starting to contribute to a good cause?
Another way this documentary could influence policy makers is within a division of the United Nations called the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health. They asked this woman at Northwestern University. Her name is Dr. Sera Young. She assembled something called the Water InSecurity Experiences (WISE) scale, designed to measure water anxiety experiences in humans. This is a data-driven research project, but based on community testimony. So this is a series of questions that they go into water stressed communities and ask people and put together these measures based on the data that they collect. So she and her team were asked to put together these modules. She approached me and said: “We don’t just want to present the data, we want videos that explain what we’re seeing in the data.” Clips from The Fight for Mother Water will therefore be sprinkled throughout these modules and will be used internationally in countries around the world. And after I finish my time in Germany, I plan to meet with UNESCO in Paris to see how we can use this documentary to work together to amplify these issues and affect much-needed change.
In addition to that, as I walked away from these communities at the end of the shooting day, I asked myself: “What is wrong with us, living in wealthy countries, allowing this part of the human family to fall so far behind?” So I decided to give all the money I made from making The Struggle for Mother Water back to these communities. I started a small charity called Mother Water Foundation. We have already subsidized our first project, a borehole (a narrow vertical or horizontal hole dug into the ground to extract natural resources such as water), in the village of Mubende, Cameroon. This is a community I visited where every Friday the students have to walk about 3 kilometers along a very dangerous path. They have to fill a 10 liter container with water from the tap and carry it on their heads back to school. And they’re like 12-year-old girls and boys. There is no study time on Fridays because every Friday we have to spend time collecting water so that we can supply water to the school during the week. So our first project is to subsidize a borehole right next to our school.
How does it feel to receive this award?
Well, the great thing about winning awards is that it provides an opportunity for people who might be interested in watching the series. It can create greater incentive and inspiration to observe the project and promote it to potential buyers. I remember many years ago when I won Canada’s Academy Award, the Genie Award, for a film called “The Terry Fox Story.” “So how do you feel?” I was asked. “Well, I don’t feel like winning makes me a better actor. I’d like to think that losing doesn’t make me a worse actor.” The nice thing is that you get to celebrate a little bit and have a good time. But above all, projects like this prove to those on the front lines of this struggle that their voices are being heard.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
