‘Water for Life’ Shines a Bright Light on Three Heroic Environmentalists in Latin America

In 2021, in the Araucanía region of Chile, indigenous Mapuche chief Alberto Curamil was shot by police officers. His “crime” was leading the populist and legal resistance to a pair of mammoth hydroelectric projects proposed for the Cautín River. His injuries were not fatal, but he is never out of danger.

Curamil’s efforts had earned him the Goldman Environmental Prize (honoring “grassroots environmental activists from around the world”) a couple years earlier, and prominent placement in a documentary-in-progress by longtime Marin County filmmaker Will Parrinello. The completed film, narrated by actor Diego Luna and entitled Water for Life, follows Curamil; Francisco Pineda, a corn-grower in El Salvador; and the late Berta Cáceres, of the Lenca in Honduras. The film receives its world premiere Oct. 9 and 14 at the Mill Valley Film Festival.

“We need to move heaven and earth to try to do something to protect Alberto,” Parrinello recalls telling his impact-campaign producers at the Abaunza Group after Curamil was shot. “I don’t think we have the power to stop the forces that exist out there that want to stop Alberto from doing his work, but we do have the ability to take a bright light and shine it on him.”

Parrinello was in the throes of editing 10 years of footage when Curamil was shot, but teamed with Amnesty International Chile to produce a short bilingual video narrated by Peter Coyote. Senior producer and award-winning San Francisco journalist Steven Talbot noted that the journalistic ideal of objectivity they were adhering to in the film precluded the filmmakers from being the face of the campaign. So they lined up a couple other Goldman prizewinners who wrote an op-ed for The Washington Post. “We were able to motivate that campaign but we had to stand back from the campaign,” Parrinello says.

Water for Life, as it turns out, doesn’t include Curamil’s shooting and its aftermath — documentaries are subject to the demands of storytelling just as much as narrative films — but the dramatic events illuminate the complications that filmmakers face in balancing personal relationships, principled activism and journalistic obligations.

In addition to Curamil’s work, Water for Life recounts Honduran activist Berta Cáceres’s costly fight against a government-backed hydro project on the Gualcarque River and Francisco Pineda’s protection of El Salvador’s essential Rio Lempa from a gold-mine venture proposed by Canadian-based multinational Pacific Rim Mining Corp.

All three stories came to Parrinello and his longtime filmmaking partner in the Mill Valley Film Group, John Antonelli, over many years of producing videos of the Goldman prizewinners. Parrinello notes that the prize doesn’t have any editorial control over the content in Water for Life, which is an independent production. In fact, Parrinello licensed footage — that he and Antonellis shot and which belongs to the prize — from them.

“This film is not a film for the Goldman Prize, or to promote the Goldman Prize or for self-aggrandizement,” he emphasizes.

A key difference between Water for Life and the prize’s commissioned video portraits is that the filmmaker recognizes that the giants have their side in these David vs. Goliath battles.

“Part of upholding the standards of journalism was to persevere to get the oppositional voice in the film,” Parrinello says in a Zoom interview. “Everyone said, ‘What do we have to gain by being in your film? You already have a bias. You are going to make us out to be the bad guys.’”

Parrinello spent six months trying to persuade Thomas Shrake, Pacific Rim’s president and CEO, to say on camera what he had told a financial publication: He was a child of the ’60s and saw himself as a steward of the earth. Consequently, he wanted to do the kind of mining that was as environmentally and socially responsible as possible.

Shrake never sat for Parrinello’s camera, but local producer Rick Tejada-Flores found a tape of the exec testifying before the World Bank Administrative Tribunal; a smoothie in a suit, the disdainful Shrake doesn’t need anybody’s help to come off as the bad guy.

Parrinello readily admits that part of his motivation for making Water for Life was to illuminate the international activities of corporations — usually based in the United States, Canada, Australia or China — that aren’t acceptable or legal in their home countries. This profit-seeking behavior is being done in our name as investors, Parrinello notes, which makes us responsible in tandem with the faceless multinationals.

“We can all no longer say it’s someone else’s responsibility to care for the earth,” Parrinello asserts. “Climate change is here and it’s a result of our actions and our activities. It’s not just that we’re burning fossil fuels. It’s our desire to consume, to have a better lifestyle, to have more material things. We have to be less concerned with profits and more concerned with the earth. One of those ways is to hold our corporate and governmental bodies accountable for their actions.”

Deep into a long career of making films about spiritual seekers, environmentalists and indigenous people, Parrinello’s fervid idealism has mellowed into a pragmatic recognition that the problem is embedded in us, as individuals.

“We use metals in our cars, in our cellphones, you have a gold ring when you get married,” he acknowledges with a what-are-you-going-to-do smile. “We’re all part of the extractive industries through our consumption, and just through our lives.”

Although Water for Life is plainly on the side of the local people and the environmental activists, Parrinello’s diligent focus on story and character leaves no room for self-righteous venting and strident anger. Paradoxically, his craft-intensive restraint — along with the abundant beauty shots of unspoiled landscapes and the lives connected to those landscapes — encourages the viewer’s expanded emotional response.

This viewer, I don’t mind telling you, was quietly infuriated. Does every meter of Earth have to be developed and exploited? Can’t anything be left in its natural state? Does power — economic, political, military — always have to be brought to bear on people viewed (only) as in the way?

We want the answer to be “no” to all the above. Parrinello’s controlled use of his material balances that big-picture view with the reality on the ground — the reality of those who actually dare to say “no.”

‘Water for Life’ plays Oct. 9 and 14 at the Mill Valley Film Festival (Oct. 5–15) with a national PBS broadcast next year. It also screens Oct. 10 as part of Berkeley Law’s International Human Rights Law Clinic with Francisco Pineda and Bertita Zuniga Cáceres (Berta Cáceres’ daughter) present.