12-03-2025
‘Capturing Water' Spotlights South Africa's Grassroots Fight to Preserve Precious Resource Before It Runs Out
In early 2018, as South Africa's Western Cape region was in the midst of a yearslong drought that brought its reservoirs to historically low levels, residents of Cape Town and its surroundings began to brace for 'Day Zero,' when the municipal water supply would be exhausted and the taps would run dry.
That catastrophe was narrowly averted. But as South African filmmaker Rehad Desai ('Miners Shot Down') warns in his timely new documentary 'Capturing Water,' playing this week at the Joburg Film Festival, the city's water crisis barely scratched the surface of a much larger threat, as climate change pushes South Africa and much of the continent to the brink of a full-scale emergency.
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'We've got 250 million people facing water stress, mainly in urban areas, across the continent by 2030,' Desai tells Variety. 'The temperatures are just [increasing] exponentially. We're a dry continent. It's becoming drier because of climate change.'
As 'Capturing Water' points out, the apocalyptic scenario that faced the Western Cape from roughly 2015-2020 was a disaster years in the making. While drought and climate change were partly to blame, so, too, were years of government neglect and mismanagement, despite the Western Cape widely being considered 'the best functioning municipality we have,' according to Desai.
The consequences on both the supply of clean water and the environment have been stark: As the film notes, not only does much of Cape Town's poorly treated sewage get pumped directly into the sea, but it takes a staggering 55 million liters of freshwater a day to get it there.
Across South Africa, the picture is even bleaker, with 3.5 million households lacking access to clean water, while 35% of the clean water that is available is lost through leaking infrastructure, according to statistics cited in the film. Desai says the country's municipalities 'don't have enough money or enough competence' to solve the problem, while budgets for government services continue to get slashed.
In that climate, the director adds, 'political choices have become critically important.' In Cape Town, just 13% of the population consumes 51% of the water, with that supply rapidly dwindling because of growing household and industrial use. Turbo-charged development, fueled in part by a post-pandemic boom in tourism, has added to the strain, putting access to clean water for millions of local residents directly at odds with a government push for relentless growth.
Water rationing has become commonplace — with much of that burden falling disproportionately on the shoulders of the poor. 'You see the inequity of the situation, and the nonsensical nature of the market approach to water, when you see that many, if not most, of our townships are only getting a couple of hours of water a day,' Desai says. 'You can see the class dimension, the class inequality, very starkly at the moment.'
That's given rise to a series of increasingly urgent questions. 'How are we going to share what water we have? What is a rational, equitable plan going forward so we don't have the urban elites…consuming as much as they want, while others don't have anything?' Desai asks.
While 'Capturing Water' doesn't answer those questions, it nevertheless points to a way forward, with the director noting: 'The best solutions for water are often the local solutions.' The documentary spotlights grassroots efforts to tackle the Western Cape's seemingly intractable water crisis, including working-class activists mobilizing against water restriction devices and water privatization; a farmer taking the Cape Town government to court over plans to cement over a vital aquifer; and a suburban activist tirelessly working to stop the sewage flowing into life-giving wetlands.
The fight, however, is not South Africa's alone. 'Capturing Water' highlights the increasingly dystopian industries that have sprung up as climate change threatens water security across the globe. In California, the purchase of millions of acres of farmland by Saudi Arabian companies exporting crops to the drought-stricken Middle East has put that state's aquifers at risk, while financial speculators gambling on water futures are literally banking on the price of water continuing to rise — pushing it further out of reach of the world's poorest billions.
'As water becomes more scarce, there's a bigger squeeze on those who can't afford to pay,' Desai says. In the process, water becomes a commodity subject to the mercies of the global marketplace, rather than a basic human right.
'Capturing Water' follows on the heels of Desai's politically charged documentaries including the Intl. Emmy Award-nominated 'Miners Shot Down,' about the notorious 2012 massacre of 34 mineworkers by South African police in the town of Marikana, and 'How to Steal a Country,' a damning portrait of the billionaire Gupta brothers, who have been accused of turning the country into their personal fiefdom.
Desai is planning a wide rollout of 'Capturing Water' — first across South Africa, then the rest of the continent — hoping to harness the urgency of the moment into a rousing call to action. 'That's what's required in this instance — a film which inspires people,' he says.
'I've understood over time that you're not going to see change, or any community of activism that has a critical mass, unless you can move people emotionally. I remain convinced that film is a very important tool in social change.'
The Joburg Film Festival runs March 11 – 16.
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