Since GreenMuze.com wrote the first review of my film BLUE GOLD: WORLD WATER WARS, I wanted to post a progress report here and offer fans a way to help ensure the film reaches the largest audience possible.
Since winning the Audience Choice Best Environmental Film at VIFF, PBS Video and Mongrel Media have picked up BLUE GOLD and will distribute the DVD in US and Canada respectively starting April 7.
BLUE GOLD has been invited for its European premiere in Paris at the European Independent Film Festival, has played and will play at several other festivals, and recently won Best Documentary at the Beloit International Film Festival.
In the coming weeks, Martin Robertson of Ideas in Motion (whom I met at the Planet in Focus Toronto screening) has generously arranged 60 screenings in 38 countries on March 22, World Water Day, for a global BLUE GOLD event despite his own fight with cancer.
I want to make people of aware of all this activity and ensure the DVD reaches the widest number of people possible. I made the film to help save the human race, and I am thrilled by audience response, but the film requires a huge audience to make a huge difference.
II have hired a major PR firm (called mPRm) in Hollywood to create press and reviews and publicity for the DVD rollout for the two months of March and April (to promote the World Water Day screenings, the April 7 DVD release, and the entire Earth Day Month of April). They start work today, but I need to pay them by April and also afford all postal and administrative costs they incur. For instance, they will send 250 DVDs out to press and reviewers but I must pay the cost of those shipments.
The journey of making BLUE GOLD has been life-changing for me and very risky both financially and personally. I traveled alone, a one-man crew, on an adventure that changed me forever. While traveling, I quickly realized that when I wrote a screenplay, I had only to research facts from a distance, but to document these horrors on film, I had to go to the source. Doing so required me to bribe Mexican guards for a 20-minute window to shoot raw sewage irrigating the farmlands. It required investigating the assassination of another documentary filmmaker trying to save African water from corporate rose plantations. It required traveling deep into Africa, where women fetch water from miles away and white men are kidnapped almost as regularly. While riding there through an armed police check-point, I ducked to avoid detection so I would not have to bribe more police (my bribe fund was drying up quicker than earth’s water supply). My guides yelled at me to sit up, to never duck! If the police saw a white man duck, they would assume he was a kidnap victim and simply gun down everyone in the car, hostage included.
Why take these risks? My conscious mind tells me I made this film for the general public, who do not know about this issue, and need to while there is time for change. My subconscious mind tells me I made it for my son. But deeper down still, I know I made it for one reason alone. As a society, it seems to me that our sole focus of environmental concern has become carbon gas emissions and global warming. But we will survive global warming. The world will be different, but we will be here.
I made this film because while global warming is an issue of ‘how’ we live, the water crisis is an issue of ‘if’ we live.
Thank you for your consideration in helping fight the water wars through the power and wide reach of film. I have made it easy to donate from my site www.bluegold-worldwaterwars.com either by PayPal or by donating to the non-profit Food & Water Watch for a tax-except donation which they will then use to finance my publicity.
Thanks.
Sam Bozzo
Director, Blue Gold: World Water Wars
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Read our interview with Sam Bozzo.
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