Title: Capturing Water
Year: 2024
Country: South Africa
Language: Afrikaans and English with English Sub Titles
Directors: Rehad Desai, Anita Khanna
Review by Modern Times (:Bianca-Olivia Nita )
Cast:
This 80-minute documentary film influenced by the 2018 drought in South Africa’s Western Cape Region is an eye opener to the state of the water crisis in Cape Town, reputed to be the best managed city in South Africa.
In a recent interview with Variety, The popular Movie Reviewer publication, director Rehad Desai talks about the city’ water crisis barely scratching the surface of a much larger threat about world climate change.
“We’ve got 250 million people facing water stress, mainly in urban areas, across the continent by 2030,” Desai tells Variety. “The temperatures are just [increasing] exponentially. We’re a dry continent. It’s becoming drier because of climate change.”
The Storyline taken from IMDB describes how the city council committed to take urgent action to protect the supply of water by enforcing a policy of limited access. Capturing Water follows the unfolding fight, led by working class activist Faeza Meyer, to overturn water cuts-offs, which are punitive to the Cape’s many poor and crowded dwellings. From the mayor self-financing crucial infrastructure to the communities living with sewage spills, and the campaigners fighting land developers that threaten the city’s aquifers, this expertly crafted documentary exposes the lethal pitfalls of market-led solutions to the water crisis.
The film is extremely engaging, exposing all the unfulfilled promises and the infrastructure that was insufficient to handle the aquifers. There were other landowners bordering on the aquifer sites who were also actively involved with the mayor and city council dealing with the issue because of lack of money inefficiency and stalled projects.
Vancouver born Koni Benson, a historian and activist, who was involved in the original concept of the film and its research, is a member of the African Water Collective. At one point in the film, Koni talks about the wealthy landowners in Cape Town who have one of lowest tax rates of major cities in South Africa So, if their tax rates were increased by only 1%, the lack of funds to deal with the issues would be solved, and the poor workers in the Cape Flats areas would not have to endure water restrictions.
Unfortunately, the reality is that it is the poor that suffer most of our Climate issue today.
