Few can be heartless or shortsighted enough not to sympathize with French-born U.S.-based Irena Salina’s Flow/For Love of Water, another in the flood of green-themed cautions, in this instance sparked by an article in The Nation, “Who Owns Water?”

David Guggenheim’s An Inconvenient Truth comes to mind, not only because both premièred at Sundance, two years apart. Global in scope, these two ecology warnings are filmed lectures, this newer one’s eighty-four minutes an array of convinced, poorly identified talking heads pro and (far less) con, whereas the 2006 PowerPoint stage presentation is threaded on the engaging personality of Al Gore and, aside from having wider, climatic concerns, includes personal sidebars.

Flow zeroes in on one major element of man’s foolishness and nature’s catastrophic response -- packaged-for-purchase “blue gold,” the element formerly known as H2O now priced higher per barrel than black gold petroleum. Not diluting its plea with even the issue of billions of discarded non-biodegradable plastic bottles, the documentary is relentless in its attack on government and business greed and in illustrating the human and ecological casualties.

Most of today’s non-fictions abandon the story approach of, say, Robert Flaherty’s Louisiana Story, oil-company-produced as it was, for straightforward bombardment with facts. Data, however -- manipulated, arranged, omitted or included, toned or commented on -- is not the stuff of a movie. For the purpose, let propaganda be taken as referring to governmental and national interests and to (often supranational) business ends which subsume mere commercial advertising. The Seventh Art that is cinema can use its unique magic to convert causes, information or ideas into its own, more than the sum of parts. Painting, music, architecture and film may inspire awe even in those who disagree with their institutional patrons: controversial, cut or complete, Reifenstahl’s Olympia is forgiven everything against NBC’s unredeemable chauvinism-skewed Beijing Games coverage.

Arty in poetic graininess even to fully lit motionlessness, Flow could more accurately if less attractively be titled “Stagnant,” “Sewage,” or “Stopped Up.” In the developed, developing and undeveloped worlds, its heroes are clear-sighted activists, its victims concentrated among the voiceless powerless poor, and its villains the powers that be in rulers and capitalists. Intercut with clean gurgling or falling water against holy Mother Ganges as a center point, interviews form the film, subtitled where there is French, Spanish, Mandarin or Xhosa or, for no reason, Indian subcontinent English.

Those displaced by mammoth dam projects or deprived of previously free decent water, are the disposable pawns in the game; they speak of the past and, bewilderment sometimes redirected into anger, of the unfair present. Short shrift is given to those who, in defense of bottom lines couched in grandiose words, commodify the once-free flowing liquid.

The bulk of time is given over to those scientists and activists who, with the beleaguered peasants, maintain that water is not to be messed with, like the air the free universal bounty of nature or gods or both. Man will survive without oil but not without water, so, beyond petroleum cartels whose moment must sooner or later wane, the cunning are banking on the latter. Through venal or bankrupt governments, through only theoretically independent lenders like IMF and the World Bank, they work their till-now unstoppable will, salting the way with false claims and broken pledges.

Not all but the brunt of the finger-pointing falls in the direction of the bottled water and the “beverage” -- soft-drink and chocolate empires are pack members -- companies which rake in an annual ninety billion dollars. Hard to trace in the pyramid of companies incorporated into others absorbed by still others, they may camouflage or confuse by advertising one of their brands against another, or print “mountain” or “spring” on labels whose contents are not subject to quality control, while their pillaging wreaks havoc on communities. Surprisingly, or perhaps not, wine country France’s multi-tentacled SUEZ and Vivendi are among foreground culprits.

Openly likened in a The Third Man clip to Harry Lime’s amoral trafficker in tainted drugs, the moneygrubbers are Chief Seattle’s whites who “view the earth . . . and rivers as his enemy [and not] our brother.”

The argument presented in Flow is hardly one to disagree with, but the movie still falls into the self-defeating pattern of the genre as practiced now. Filmmakers have left narrative behind in favor of screen screed, and do not remember that non-fiction’s characters, too, can act and speak to one another rather than into the camera. 

(Released by Oscilloscope Laboratories; not rated by MPAA.)