SYNOPSIS
This is a story about water. A song for the sacred in all of us. A documentary centered on solutions. This is a look at the driest of places - California and the Southwest - and the deepest of spaces - our inner worlds and the stories we choose to tell. We are invited to change our perspective, to rewrite our stories, and ultimately, to heal our broken relationships with the natural world.
Where land is desert, and water is scarce, we find hope and resilience in Navajo Nation. Where statewide infrastructure is failing, we find innovation and conservation. Where salmon and beavers are reintroduced into streams, we find restored ecosystems. With reforestation, we find healthier watersheds. In cities, we find urban farmers, healing soil and building community, in conversation with mother earth. Where cattle are managed holistically on grassland, we find cleaner groundwater and healthier springs. Instead of vineyards depleting aquifers, we find biodiversity, responsibility, and hope. Where traditional agriculture has sucked wells dry, we choose a new way forward. And in our own kitchens, we find we have great power, and great choice… to use less, waste less, and ask questions. To choose the water story we tell, one meal at a time.
The choice point has arrived. The old story will bring scarcity. But a new story, one that we can write together, may indeed lead us to abundance and water for all. Only through personal relationship with the sacred can we truly begin to heal. Water is life. Water is love. What can you do, in your life, to be a voice for the water?
DIRECTOR STATEMENT
Access to clean water changes a life. After my travels around the world in 2008, this truth became too much to carry without some sort of action on my part. In 2010 I chose to pedal a bicycle across the United States to raise money for WaterAid, an international non-profit working to provide access to clean water and sanitation, globally. In 2013 I began photographing the effects of the drought in my home state of California, through a personal photography project which ultimately became this film. I have since become active with DigDeep, a nonprofit working to provide running water to families in Navajo Nation. There are still over 1.7 million people, right here in the United States, who are living without access to clean running water at home.
Through research, curiosity, and love, I have attempted, with this film, to be in service to the water that gives us life. To tell the story that connects us all ... the story of water. Time is short. The climate has changed. Water is sacred. We must find a new way. We must write a new story. And we must write it together. The choice point has arrived.
Thank you for joining me on this journey. - Brittany App
Brittany App is a professional photographer with two decades of experience and two circumnavigations of the globe under her belt, and she debuts "Where There Once Was Water" as a first-time Director & Producer. Her passion is water, water access, regenerative agriculture and ruminants. Brittany is a story-teller, a voice-artist, a sheep-shearer, and a self-proclaimed shepherdess-in-training. She lives off the grid in the remote Carrizo Plain, CA – learning to homestead with a rag-tag wooly crew of sheep, duck ducks, and livestock guardian dogs … and sunsets that fill the whole sky.