SAVAGE SENSES

Interview: “Last Call at the Oasis” Director Jessica Yu Talks Big Issue Docs and Avoiding Fearmongering

With the remarkable issue doc Last Call at the Oasis opening this Friday, I’m re-posting the first part of my interview with director Jessica Yu from the Toronto Film Festival last fall. It begins here and then continues over at its original home at Spout.

As I noted in my review of “Last Call at the Oasis,” I’m not always for the big issue docs that try to save the world. So I was pleasantly surprised to really enjoy and appreciate how Jessica Yu worked with a grand-scale cause such as water. As in water shortage, water contamination and really ~~any~~ every other water-related problem affecting some part of the world today. I just had to talk to the Oscar-winning filmmaker, known previously for nontraditional docs like “In the Realms of the Unreal” and “Protagonist” and the fictional sports comedy “Ping Pong Playa,” to find out her secret recipe for making a great issue doc that isn’t heavy on scare tactics or boring fact sheets. The first part of this conversation is below. You can find the second part, about documentary immediacy, at the Documentary Channel Blog.

You’re not really known for issue films. How did you get involved with this?

Jessica Yu: Water is one of the five urgent threats that Participant is targeting, and I knew Diane Weyermann from Sundance and at Participant and I really respect her. So when she came to me about it, I think my initial reaction was that it’s so awesome to make a film about water because it’s so visual. We think of beautiful water, when we think of it, like waterfalls and streams.

The second thing I knew is that I felt like I was fairly aware of water issues, but I thought if we’re making a film about water, whatever I find is going to be much, much worse than what I think I know. The problems that are out there are much more intense and immediate than I had anticipated. That was interesting to me, the way we have a mental image of water and we have the way we think about water and then we have what’s actually happening.

Your past nonfiction films show you have a great interest in arts and storytelling, so you bring something great to the issue doc genre, where others might be concerned only with facts, facts, facts.

All documentaries — all films — should be storytelling. But here there’s a challenge because there’s a certain amount of information people need to have to put the big picture together. I like the challenge of trying to figure out how you make all these things not abstractions. You have to tell people stories so it sticks, because they care about the situation.

The other thing we were looking for is stories that were not the most obvious. We started with Vegas because if you ask someone what city should be worried about water, everyone knows. And then from there it’s like, well it’s not just Vegas…

Continue reading at Spout.

Excellent interview with Last Call at the Oasis director Jessica Yu. If you missed our review of the documentary, you can find that here!

Tags: documentary interview issues water participant media clean water water crisis Last Call at the Oasis Jessica Yu

Opening titles for Last Call at the Oasis, directed by Jessica Yu. Music by Jeff Beal.

Reviewed by Farah Momin for Savage Senses:

My experience watching Last Call at The Oasis was full of surprises, the first being that I was completely alone in the movie theater at 5pm on a Wednesday afternoon in NYC. Considering the direness of the situation regarding the world’s water crisis, I hoped that more people would be going out to see this documentary. Although it is beautifully shot, it presents an ugly picture of what we can expect to happen to this vital yet limited resource if we do not take action.

I wasn’t surprised to learn that the United States has the world’s largest water footprint: an average of 2842 m³/yr per capita compared to the global average of 1385 m³/yr per capita according to a UNESCO study. This fact is evident of the American attitude of self-interestedness and wastefulness. Because we have eradicated water-borne illness in this country, we don’t think about those people around the world who do not have immediate access to clean water. At the same time, our own water and food supplies are contaminated with chemicals like Atrazine from pesticides. In places like the Nevada desert surrounding Las Vegas, the local water supply may dry up in as little as four years.

These facts are scary, but even worse is people’s reluctance to support innovative solutions such as recycled water. As psychologist Paul Rozin notes in the documentary, getting someone to accept the idea of drinking former wastewater that has been treated to be drinkable is just as much of a challenge as getting someone to wear Hitler’s sweater. Singapore has had great success in providing universal and affordable access to water in large part by putting in place a system to recycle it, and other countries should be following suit.

We see a lot of media coverage on the oil crisis, and what this documentary aims to make people realize is that water is the next natural resource over which wars will be fought if we don’t take action now to prevent that from happening. The Last Call at the Oasis website has a list of 10 simple things you can do to be part of the solution to the world’s water crisis rather than part of the problem.

Whether or not you’ve seen the documentary, we’d love to hear your thoughts on the world’s water crisis. You can also watch the trailer below: