An international award-winning documentary by Dunedin film-maker Rowan Wernham has just been released online and threads about the film have attracted tens of millions of views in the wake of the LA fires.
The documentary, Pistachio Wars, tells the story of California’s two biggest pistachio farmers, water grabs and resource depletion, economic blockades, inequality and the geopolitics that have helped the Californian pistachio industry become huge.
At the heart of the Ravensbourne-raised and University of Otago-educated film-maker’s doco is billionaire American couple and pistachio farmers Stewart and Lynda Resnick, who use a significant amount of California’s water supply for their farming.
Mr Wernham said the documentary had only screened at film festivals up until now.
"But we noticed that with the fires in Los Angeles, there was this massive amount of attention diverted towards the water issues in California and the Resnicks.
"Suddenly there were articles about the Resnick’s water-use going viral online, videos and things like that.
"So, we just thought there was so much interest, we really need to put the movie out."
Some people had taken a "big leap" and started saying that the Resnick’s water-use had caused LA firefighters to run out of water recently.
"That’s not correct.
"The Los Angeles firefighters were using local water systems that just weren’t really up to the task of delivering the amount of water they needed to put an entire city out.
"So, I think people made a connection where it might not have been correct.
"But at the same time, people haven’t really had the Resnicks on their radar and they haven’t really been talking about the privatisation of water that has been driven by their farming business.
"So, we’re kind of like, ‘Well, if people want to be interested in this, even if it’s slightly the wrong reason, we’re quite happy to give them some more information through our film’."
He said the 75-minute documentary was released on an independent video-on-demand platform called GATHR.
"We put it up with a little teaser, not even a proper trailer, and within an afternoon we had some tweets and things about the movie and it got around a little bit," he said.
"One of them got to over 20 million views at one point, and thousands and thousands of retweets on this massive thread."
He said since the launch a week ago, the documentary had had "quite a large amount" of downloads.
"We’ve made thousands of dollars off the streaming.
"I won’t give you the exact numbers, but we’ve also raised over $US1000 [$NZ1780] for charity."
Mr Wernham said he was surprised about the impact the film was having.
Hollywood director Adam McKay, who directed Don’t Look Up, Anchorman and Vice, watched the documentary and sent "a really emphatic, kind and positive response" to it.
"He gave us this great blurb comparing the movie to Chinatown for the age of climate change.
"We’ve also had people tweeting about it and writing reviews ... largely very positive.
"It’s fantastic, it’s a great outcome."
Mr Wernham said New Zealanders could stream the documentary on pistachiowars.com and he hoped to release it on select streaming services within the next few months.
