VIFF Reviews: Atom Smashers & Blue Gold
In recent years there has been a spate of documentaries on the subject of water: its increasing commodification and the greed, corruption, and mis-management surrounding it.
At the heart of Sam Bozzo's Blue Gold: World Water Wars, showing at VIFF (9th,10th), is a strongly held belief that access to fresh water should be a basic human right. Partly educational with fine little animations explaining how the water cycle works, it's also a plea to recognise the scale of the problem. Many salutary examples of water privatisation are paraded – from the violent ruptures in Bolivian when government ceded its water rights to Bechtel, to grass roots actions in the States that have had mixed success in combatting corporations tapping their water supplies.
It shows how in the world of supply and demand, what's good for big business is bad for the environment. Think drought and water pollution, or consider the carbon footprint of desalination plants and truckloads of water criss-crossing the continent. Lest it all gets too depressing, the film knits together good-news stories such as the story of Ryan's Well and stories of how denuded water systems are being recovered.
Blue Gold doesn't always get the facts right (water privatisation didn't happen throughout the UK - Scotland and Northern Ireland's water services remained publicly owned due to grass-roots opposition), but it identifies disturbing patterns which we should all pay close attention to.
A flurry of recent media coverage over the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) in Switzerland, shone a spotlight on the 40-year-old search for the hypothetical “Higgs' boson,” a “God particle” that physicists hope to eventually discover by smashing particles together at very great speeds in complex and expensive particle accelerators. Documentary The Atom Smashers (4th, 5th, 8th) picks up with a US team at the Fermilab laboratory who have been working in this field of research for many years, as the LHC prepares to come online. Fermilab's physicists are feeling the pressure to win this subatomic space race as the Bush government slashes away at the its budget.
It's not exactly clear what millions of dollars of publicly funded research has achieved, which is hardly surprising perhaps given the opaque nature of high energy physics. But it also leaves scientists struggling to justify the huge expense in lay terms. Directors Clayton Brown and Monica Long Ross make effective use of black and white animation to explain the workings of the Tevatron, Fermilab's four-mile tunnel where the particle smashing takes place. Broadening the focus to the private lives, aspirations, and setbacks of the physicists in Femilab's programme adds a touch of human interest while the big question is why Science, in general, has lost its value in Bush's US. It seems science is facing a serious image problem. The answer to that problem, however, seems as elusive as the Higgs' boson.
Here's a few more VIFF films that look worthwhile: Let the Right One In (5th, 6th, 8th) is a genre-bending horror that has been getting great reviews on the festival circuit; Tokyo! (8th, 9th) is a trio of films set in the Japanese capital by three very capable directors (Michel Gondry, Leos Carax, Bong Joon-Ho); I Am Good (1st, 7th, 9th), is a light comedy from Czech director and VIFF regular Jan Hrebejk, who always impresses with the fullness of his characters; and there's also the closing film The Class, a high school drama set in a poor multicultural Parisian suburb, that won the Palme d'Or winner at Cannes this year.