Waterlife, Directed by Kevin McMahon
Screening at the Lake Erie Center, Thursday, June 18th, 2009, 7:00 pm 
The Great Lakes, pouring toward the Atlantic Ocean, as seen from space. The lakes contain approximately 20 per cent of the surface fresh water on earth and more than 90 per cent of that available to the United States. (Image credit: Mark Alberts)
Synopsis:
107 min; co-produced by Primitive Entertainment and the National Film Board, 2009
WATERLIFE tells the epic story of the Great Lakes by following the cascade of its water from northern Lake Superior to the Atlantic Ocean, through the lives of some of the 35 million people who rely on the lakes for survival. Providing Earth with 20 per cent of its surface fresh water and its third largest industrial economy, the Great Lakes are a unique and precious resource under assault by toxins, sewage, invasive species, evaporating water and profound apathy. They are also one of the planet’s great preserves of extraordinary wilderness beauty and a bounty of unique species.
WATERLIFE blends these realities with a dreamlike fluidity as it pours through the lives of some amazing characters. We meet an Anishinabe medicine woman who walked 17,000 kms around the lakes to sympathize with them; the last of the great Michigan fishing families; a man whose lakefront home now borders a field thanks to sewer overflows; the people of a village where mysterious toxins ensure that most new babies are girls; and the residents of Love Canal, a notorious Niagara Falls neighborhood abandoned in the 1970s and now, dubiously, refurbished.
Along the way, WATERLIFE shows viewers the Great Lakes as they might appear to a seagull, a fish or a water molecule… and from a myriad of other, amazing perspectives.
Filmed over a full year with a battery of specialty cameras and techniques, WATERLIFE provides an unprecedented view of an incredible ecosystem rarely seen by the city dwellers who form most of its population. From the ornate fountains of Chicago to the sewers of Windsor, viewers are carried through marsh and pipe, across pounding waves and through thunder clouds on a journey which, as the film says, has no “ending or beginning, that shapes every body it passes through and unites them all across space and time.”
WATERLIFE’s director Kevin McMahon is one of Canada’s most innovative documentary filmmakers, and its producers include Mark Achbar, creator of the controversial hit The Corporation. Gord Downie, leader of The Tragically Hip and a Lake Ontario Waterkeeper, narrates WATERLIFE. Topping off this epic cinematic poem is a fabulous sound track featuring Sam Roberts, The Allman Brothers, Dropkick Murphys, Sufjan Stevens, Sigur Ros, Robbie Robertson, Daniel Lanois, Phillip Glass, Brian Eno and a new song by The Tragically Hip.
