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A Portrait of the Water Crisis and the Collective Struggle: Interview with Isabel and Alfredo Alcántara, Directors of LA EDAD DEL AGUA

Ariadna Lucas Coronel

In the first months of the year, the country and, especially, the capital city were convulsed by a water crisis that was widely covered due to the centrality of the problem. However, the problem of scarcity, overexploitation of aquifers, contamination and privatization of water have been central issues in communities such as La Cantera, Guanajuato.

In 2016, UNAM research hydrogeologist Marcos Adrián Ortega Guerrero released the results of one of the many investigations he has been conducting in the community for several years: the water they drink contains high levels of radiation. The last investigation was conducted after at least five people, among them three girls, died of a very aggressive form of cancer, which raised doubts as to the source of the condition.

We spoke with Alfredo Alcántara and Isabel Alcántara, siblings and directors of La edad del agua ( 2024), about their participation in the Mexican Feature Documentary Section at the 22nd edition of FICM.

FICM: How did you find the story of the community of La Cantera? What were the first encounters with the girls' families like?

Alfredo Alcántara: Isabel and I were doing some research for another completely different documentary, about water, but on a different subject. And we went to this community of La Cantera when we met a UNAM researcher, Dr. Marcos Adrián Ortega Guerrero. Dr. Ortega Guerrero is a hydrogeologist and had been studying water in this region for several decades. He told us that perhaps we should look at what was happening in this community because he believed that it was linked to something bigger, namely the crisis of overexploitation of the aquifers in the whole area. He invited us to the sampling he was doing and that is where we met a group of women who had just begun their research and requested the university's support.  Because the local authorities were not really supporting them. Basically what they were trying to find out was why three girls from the community had died of a very aggressive and not so common cancer within a period of three years. Which made them wonder what was going on and look for the answer. When we met them, Isabel and I were extremely inspired and moved by the story, by what they had told us about the girls. From that moment on we said: “There might be something here”. And what happened was that all the facts started to emerge. Everything started to pick up speed and Isabel and I were there with the camera and then we realized that we were already producing a documentary.

FICM: Considering this start, what was your objective as you began to realize that it was shaping up as a documentary? How did you approach the story that was being presented to you? 

Isabel Alcántara: The first goal we had was to tell a story from the women's point of view. It became extremely important for us to say, this is not only a story of what is happening with water in the community, but how the story unfolded through them; how they were the ones who launched the research and how their perspective as mothers led them to want to improve the community. So the first goal when we saw that this was starting in earnest was to decide the point of view we wanted to take. We are going to incorporate ourselves into this community and we are going to present the lives of these women as the foreground of the story. And from that point on, we will explore what is happening with the water issue. And after that, we realized that explaining the science, explaining what an aquifer is and how it works and why this problem is happening, is not secondary, but it is part of a larger picture. But what we wanted was that human story.

FICM: One of the many successes of the way the subject was dealt with is to show how the social fabric is breaking down when the authorities blame the MAYOYE collective, when in fact everything that is happening is their fault. Did you manage to change the point of view of those who positioned themselves against these mothers at any point during  filming? 

Alfredo Alcántara: That's a good question. I think it is like we are always walking a tightrope, being documentary filmmakers, where we want to be objective and impartial, but at the same time we are very moved by the story of the women, of the girls. Isabel and I talk about it a lot, but at the same time our instinct as documentary filmmakers has always been to stay a little more in the background. To be able to integrate ourselves as sensitively as possible into the story and the context. So we didn't manage to have those conversations directly during the shoot. But maybe at some point, being able to screen this documentary in the community or in the region, will make those objectives transcend a little bit to what we can do directly. Perhaps the project can change perspectives or perhaps a retrospective of what happened.

Isabel Alcántara: And also, we never wanted to take away their role as activists. Incorporating ourselves into the documentation of the struggle was much more important than getting involved in the activism of which they were the leaders in their community.

FICM: What do you think is the biggest challenge to face the problems of the community of La Cantera?

Isabel Alcántara: Well, the biggest challenge is communication. There is so much contradictory information that it makes it difficult to describe the science, the facts, and to find out who is to blame and what the solutions are.

Alfredo Alcántara: Part of what we would like to achieve with this project is to be able to support organizations in the region that have been working on this problem. And something that interests us greatly is to be able to support an organization that since the 1970s has been supporting communities to build rainwater harvesting systems. This is not a direct solution to the water problem, but at least it is a tool for the communities to have safe drinking water. I believe that, for La Cantera, being able to have access to healthy water, being able to have access to information regarding the risks involved in water consumption and the risks involved in the presence of radon gas in the community. Those are the most direct challenges for the community. The availability of information is really the biggest challenge because there is none. So we hope that perhaps this project will encourage local and regional authorities to supply more of that information.

FICM: In terms of access to information, did you have any problems in gathering some of the testimonies? How did you deal with the authorities who appear in the documentary?

Alfredo Alcántara: The truth is that the federal authorities, especially CONAGUA, were always very open with us and we with them. From the beginning, we told them what we were doing, and the story we were following, and they also opened their doors to us so that we could document their version. The truth is that it was very important for us to have that perspective as well, to generate a balance and a dialogue to analyze. We had all the pieces of information, we had the science, to understand what is really going on, right? So it was important for us to be able to have that side.

FICM: What personal impact did making the documentary have on your vision of the environment, and how did it affect your awareness of the problems faced by these families?

Isabel Alcántara: The documentary opened my eyes more than anything else to what agro-industrial overexploitation was creating in Mexico. Environmental issues were already part of what I was reading and researching through various other projects, but understanding what that overexploitation was, and the type of industry, and private investments that were creating these problems for local communities, was the biggest eye-opener for me to see how much of Mexico was for sale. That was something that changed my perspective to see the fields full of vegetables, to see all these private industries, American industries, going to Mexico to extract the resources. And to see how women face these challenges, how they do it in such an honest way and do it with the sole goal of improving the community and improving the lives of their children, inspires me in such an extraordinary way how one can see a better life and try to achieve it with whatever means one has.

Alfredo Alcántara: It also made us look inward and look at our personal lives a little bit. Both Isabel and I suffer from autoimmune diseases. It is still difficult to understand exactly the link between them and water, but there has been more and more research linking these types of diseases to contaminated water, very similar to what is happening in this region. Then we also realized that all our lives we were growing up drinking that same water that is also affecting the community. So we all felt more connected and in a somewhat alarming way.