BRATTLEBORO — On Tuesday, March 22, at 7:30 p.m., the multimedia arts venue Epsilon Spires will screen Aquarela, a provocative feature-length documentary that uses breathtaking footage shot on three continents to explore the evolving role that water plays in our lives and our environment.
The screening will be followed by a panel discussion featuring four local experts in sustainability who will examine the relationship between water and our community in a crucial conversation on World Water Day.
“Water makes and unmakes everything on our planet,” Stephen Dotson, the sustainability coordinator for the Town of Brattleboro and a member of the panel leading the discussion, said in a news release. “Our future depends on coming into harmony with this vital resource and gift.”
Joining Dotson on the panel will be Rich Holschuh, an independent historic and cultural researcher who has served on the Vermont Commission on Native American Affairs and is currently the Tribal Historic Preservation Officer for the Elnu Abenaki.
Holschuh is also founder of the Atowi Project, a community initiative that seeks to “affirm Native relationships to the Land and its inhabitants, raise indigenous voices, and foster inclusion,” according to its website.
The panel will also feature Kathy Urffer, a former member of the Brattleboro Town Planning Commission who currently serves as the river steward for the Connecticut River Conservancy in Vermont and New Hampshire, and Julia Cavicchi, education director at the Rich Earth Institute, a pioneering research organization that supports sustainable agriculture by turning human urine into fertilizer.
“In my job as River Steward, I am forced to feel intimately the changes, impacts, degradation and disregard of this vital substance that we all rely on for our life force,” says Urffer. “We need to think about how to heal our relationships with water and anticipate what the profound changes from climate change will mean.”
Aquarela, which was an official selection at Sundance and the Venice Film Festival in 2018, foregoes traditional documentarian elements like narration and commentary in order to allow the riveting footage of water shot by director Viktor Kossakovsky to tell the story of its spectacular power.
From the film's initial shocking scene on a partially frozen lake to mesmerizing shots of glaciers and towering ocean waves, Aquarela is “a feast of imagery” that is “visually overwhelming in all the right ways,” according to critic Guy Lodge at Variety.
After the film, the panel will discuss topics such as how water shaped our local ecosystem to attract human inhabitants to this area for thousands of years and how we can continue to work on our relationship with water locally to increase our health and prosperity.
“We've organized our lives and societies around how water moves and gathers, without thinking about how fundamental it really is,” says Dotson.
Tickets for the event are $15 each and can be purchased at epsilonspires.org.