‘Capturing Water’ Spotlights South Africa’s Grassroots Fight to Preserve Precious Resource Before It Runs Out

variety.com:

Christopher Vourlias In early 2018, as South Africa’s Western Cape region was in the midst of a yearslong drought that brought its reservoirs to historically low levels, residents of Cape Town and its surroundings began to brace for “Day Zero,” when the municipal water supply would be exhausted and the taps would run dry.

That catastrophe was narrowly averted. But as South African filmmaker Rehad Desai (“Miners Shot Down”) warns in his timely new documentary “Capturing Water,” playing this week at the Joburg Film Festival, the city’s water crisis barely scratched the surface of a much larger threat, as climate change pushes South Africa and much of the continent to the brink of a full-scale emergency. “We’ve got 250 million people facing water stress, mainly in urban areas, across the continent by 2030,” Desai tells Variety. “The temperatures are just [increasing] exponentially.

We’re a dry continent. It’s becoming drier because of climate change.” As “Capturing Water” points out, the apocalyptic scenario that faced the Western Cape from roughly 2015-2020 was a disaster years in the making.

While drought and climate change were partly to blame, so, too, were years of government neglect and mismanagement, despite the Western Cape widely being considered “the best functioning municipality we have,” according to Desai.