Canadian filmmaker Michael Zelniker, who will receive the Taormina Film Festival‘s Special Sustainability Award on Thursday evening, is on a mission to try and heal the damages humanity is inflicting on planet Earth.
Zelniker, who previously helmed the acclaimed 2022 deforestation docuseries “The Issue With Tissue — a Boreal Love Story” — which will soon be playing in a new cut at London’s upcoming Raindance Film Festival — traveled to 21 countries to make eight-part docuseries “The Struggle for Mother Water.” The series, which premiered at the Berlinale Series Market in February, delves into the frontlines of the water crisis through the prism of how women are leading the fight to protect and defend water.
A former actor who appeared in films such as Canadian docudrama “The Terry Fox Story,” Clint Eastwood’s “Bird” and David Cronenberg’s “Naked Lunch,” Zelniker more recently pivoted toward environmental storytelling because, “There is something really powerful about visiting communities [impacted by ecological disasters] where the people’s voices have for too long been unheard,” he says.
Below, Zelniker speaks to Variety about the journey of “The Struggle for Mother Water” and the impact the series is starting to make.
I will be going to Germany where the GIZ — the German government agency that oversees international aid — have invited me to the Bonn Climate Change Conference after its senior members saw “The Struggle for Mother Wwater” in Berlin. So now all the international policy makers that convene in Bonn for the climate conference will be at the screening. I’m going to speak, and one of the women that I collaborated with on “The Struggle for Mother Water,” the Cameroon part of the story, she will be with me. It will be an opportunity, again, to try and promote some change.
World Water Day happens every year, and at the United Nations in New York City they have a big event there sponsored by UN Water and UN Women. They invited me there and played a few minutes of the series. They had me stand up, and it was really moving. Actually, I started crying a little bit, because, you know, there’s this huge international delegation. I’m a kid from Montreal who grew up watching hockey on a Saturday night, so to be at the UN in one of the big conference rooms, having a few minutes of my documentary screen in front of this international delegation, and to see people moved by the work that I’ve aggregated in some way – because I don’t take responsibility for how profoundly moving these testimonies are, I’ve just been responsible for gathering them together in a cohesive narrative. It was really a special day. UN Water and UN Women have now lined up a series of events through the rest of the year during which they are going to use the documentary.
Another way in which the documentary could potentially serve to influence policymakers is within this division of the UN called the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health. They commissioned this woman at Northwestern University, her name is Dr. Sarah Young. She has assembled this thing called Water InSecurity Experiences (WISE) Scales, designed to measure the human experience of water insecurity. It’s a data-driven research project, but it’s based on testimony in a community. So it’s a series of questions where they go into water stress communities and ask people questions and based on the data they gather, they’ve put together these scales. So she and her team have been commissioned to put together these modules. She approached me and said, “We don’t want to just present data, we want to be able to have some video that illustrates what we’re seeing in the data.” So clips from “The Struggle for Mother Water” are going to be sprinkled throughout these modules that are going to be used internationally in countries all over the world. Then I’m meeting with UNESCO in Paris after I finish in Germany to see how we can collaborate using the documentary to amplify these issues to try and influence the much needed change.
On top of that, when I walked away from these communities at the end of the day of shooting, I asked myself, “What’s wrong with those of us who live in affluent countries that we’ve allowed some members of our human family to fall so far behind?” So I decided every dollar that comes to me from the making of “The Struggle for Mother Water” will go back to these communities. I formed this little charitable organization called The Mother Water Fund. We’ve already subsidized our first project, a borehole [a narrow, vertical or horizontal hole drilled into the earth to extract natural resources such as water] in the village of Bende in Cameroon. This is a community that I visited, where the students every Friday have to trek about three kilometers down a really treacherous path. They have to collect water from a tap in these 10-liter containers, trek it back to the school on their heads. And these are like 12-year-old girls and boys. Every Friday, they have to spend time gathering water so that the school has water during the week, so there’s no learning time available on Fridays. So the first project is to subsidize a borehole right by the school.
Well, you know, the great thing about winning awards is it provides an opportunity for people who might be interested in seeing the series. It might create a greater incentive or inspiration to watch the project, and to promote it for potential buyers. I remember years ago, I won a Genie Award, the Canadian Academy Award, for a movie called “The Terry Fox Story.” I was asked, “So, how do you feel?” I said: “Well, I don’t feel like I’m a better actor because I won. I like to think that I wouldn’t feel like I was a worse actor because I lost.” The nice thing is that you get to have a little bit of a celebration and have some fun. But more than anything, with a project like this it’s validation for those who are on the front lines of this struggle that their voices are being heard.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.