Water shortages in many Venezuelan cities are worsened by power cuts and the deterioration of public services, especially affecting the poorest neighborhoods. Most of their inhabitants fight every day to obtain water outside the cities with the serious risks it entails. Others have been implementing a water survival strategy for decades. This is featured in the short film La camisa sucia (The stained shirt), finalist of the We Art Water Film Festival 3.

Water with fecal waste is one of the main causes of food contamination and its spreading in a community. The solution is to ensure safe access to water and adequate sanitation and to implement personal hygiene practices in those who prepare the food and those who eat it. The short film Pollution Cycle, finalist at the We Art Water Film Festival 4, shows how easily unclean water can spread infections through a simple sandwich.

The climate crisis can cause a severe demographic imbalance in countries that already experience a considerable water stress: uncontrolled internal migrations, less visible than cross-border ones, but with increasingly uncertain consequences. A study by the World Bank draws the attention of the international community and takes a first step towards the creation of a model to follow up a phenomenon that may affect more than 140 million people.

In India, the enormous challenge of achieving the sustainable growth of a country that in a few years will be the most populated in the world, should be based on avoiding the ruin of small farmers, empowering them to fight drought, the degradation of the land, single-crop farming and social imbalance. The construction of small self-managed reservoirs brings life to the most impoverished farmers and is a development model to be followed in semiarid regions.

The oil spills in the Marañón River cause an environmental and human disaster that reveals the defenselessness suffered by many Amazonia inhabitants when faced with the legal maze in the fight for their human rights. The short film Cuninico, when the rain forest turns black, finalist of the We Art Water Film Festival 4, shows the marginalization of the natives whose lives and economy directly depend on the river.

The periodic crises in the African “Hunger Belt” have provided a more accurate and effective vision of the relationship between desertification and human activities. Regardless of the droughts, poor resource exploitation practices have been determinants of land degradation. The African Great Green Wall project gives hope to the Sahel, one of the most vulnerable areas to the current climate crisis.

In Rwanda, one of Africa’s emerging economies, half of the population lacks access to water. In villages like Rugaramura, water supply disruptions last for weeks and its inhabitants have to fetch water outside the village. “Amazi”, one of the finalist short films of the We Art Water Film Festival 4, recreates an attitude that is the basis of the Rwandan people’s recovery: joy, a shared emotion that best integrates a community to face the future with confidence.

In the cities in Nigeria, only one in ten people has a supply of water. For homeless children it is a treasure that is difficult to find. This is the case of Bala, the protagonist of the micro-documentary Pure Water Boy, the winner of the Audience Award of the We Art Water Film Festival 4: he survives by selling water and by drinking the remains of what he sells. But he considers himself fortunate: his colleagues in the north of the country live in worse conditions.