Across three countries, three people refused to let governments and multinational corporations take their water. In Honduras, Berta Cáceres, leader of the Lenca people, rallied her community against a series of government-backed hydroelectric dams and pressured the world's largest dam builder to pull out entirely. In El Salvador, subsistence corn farmer Francisco Pineda fought a decade-long legal battle to stop Canadian mining company Pacific Rim from contaminating the Rio Lempa, the river his community depends on. In Chile, Mapuche leader Alberto Curamil sued the government for building hydroelectric projects on Indigenous land without consent, was shot by police and imprisoned on fabricated charges, and won the Goldman Environmental Prize from his prison cell. Narrated by Mexican actor Diego Luna, with an original song performed by Grammy-winning singer Lila Downs and Chilean Mapuche singer-songwriter Daniela Millaleo, Water for Life is a documentary that took over twelve years to make and documents victories that the world barely heard about when they happened. Directed by Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Will Parrinello, whose previous work has screened at Sundance, Tribeca, and the Venice Film Festival.

Why This Film Matters: Water is not a commodity. That sentence is either obvious or radical depending on who you ask, and corporations, governments, and international financial institutions have spent decades betting that enough people won't ask at all. Water for Life documents what happens when Indigenous communities decide the answer is not acceptable: the violence directed at them, the legal systems used against them, and the extraordinary patience required to fight a transnational corporation through courts for a decade and win. At a time when water scarcity is accelerating due to climate change, when extractive industries are expanding into Indigenous territories with the backing of governments that signed international rights agreements they have no intention of honouring, and when environmental activists are being killed at record rates, this film is not a historical document. Every story in it is still happening somewhere right now.