Episode
Robert Strand: How a Film Festival Builds Political Will for Global Water Policy
- Podcast
- Liquid Assets
- Published
- May 25, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 2104
- Processing state
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Summary
A film festival launched because one filmmaker couldn't find a place to submit his short about pharmaceutical pollution in New York City's water supply is now pursuing official UN Water partner status, operating across four continents, and screening PFAS films to law students in Tanzania before they even know they have a PFAS problem. Robert Strand built the World Water Film Festival from a cold email to a UN groundwater research center in Delft into an organization with over 400 film submissions and events in Wellington, Guangzhou, Rotterdam, London, and Buenos Aires. The bet is simple: data and white papers stay in people's heads. Film brings water crises into the body. And once it's personal, people move.What Ravi and Robert cover: • How a cold email to IGRAC, the UN groundwater center in Delft, seeded a partnership that brought Henk Ovink, lead architect of the 2023 UN Water Conference, to deliver opening remarks at the festival's New York launch, and why that single exchange became the organizing model for everything that followed. • Why film accomplishes what white papers cannot: Ovink's framing that film takes data out of the head and brings it to the heart became the festival's informal mission statement, tested across 90 films in five themed screening spaces at Columbia University's climate school. • How the festival's global footprint grew almost entirely through relationship chains, from a water journalist in Tanzania opening East Africa, to Water New Zealand hosting in Wellington, to the Dutch Consulate General requesting an event in Guangzhou, to a World Toilet Day screening at Museo Moderno in Buenos Aires. • Why Robert's team is now working with the Law Society of Tanzania to bring PFAS films to environmental law students, because contamination has alrea…