Aquarela: World Water Day Film & Discussion

On International Water Day Epsilon Spires offers a  screening of the documentary AQUARELA and a community conversation. Local presenters, Stephan Dotson (Town of Brattleboro Sustainability Coordinator), Rich Holschuh (Atowi Project), Julia Cavicchi (Rich Earth Institute), and Kathy Urffer (Connecticut River Conservancy) will lead a dynamic conversation about our regional relationship to water.  

The discussion will explore the following questions:

·         How water helped create this place and has attracted people to gather here for thousands of years

·         How we continue to work on our relationship to water locally, in order to become more sustainable, prosperous, and healthy

·         How water is a key factor in climate change events and our economy, impacting where and how we can live here in Vermont

Victor Kossakovsky’s AQUARELA poses a thought-provoking question: what would a movie feel like if its main character — its driving emotional heartbeat — was not human at all, but an element of nature? Spanning the globe, AQUARELA unfolds as a fiercely lyrical, multi-sensorial experience that seeks to break the boundaries between human and nature. 

The film includes footage captured in seven different countries — Scotland, Mexico, Russia, Greenland, Venezuela, Portugal and the U.S. — plus dramatic, exclusive footage taken cross the Atlantic Ocean. The screen becomes an access point for audiences to give in to pure sensation — seeing, hearing and viscerally feeling the essence of a substance so essential to us that we usually take all its glories — and its incipient threats — for granted. At a time rife with catastrophic images that overwhelm, AQUARELA attempts something entirely different. It invites audiences to come closer, and even closer, so that you might enter nature’s power and experience our own raw fragility in a new way.

World Water Day was adopted by the United Nations in 1993 and is observed around the world, to bring attention to the crucial importance of protecting the earth’s stores of fresh water.  Choosing an important theme each year, World Water Day 2020 turns its attention to water and climate change, and how the two are inextricably linked.