It took me a long time to get through this one and a half hour movie because I repetitively stopped the film and took down important notes. But it wasn’t until the end that I took in an intake of breath. Then I took two screen shots and rushed them to my affected sons (shown at end of review).
“Lead and Copper” is about the Flint, Mich., water debacle and how the city and state despicably lied to the residents. It is also about the Newark, New Jersey, and Washington, DC, water crises. The first reaction of city officials with a city problem seems to be denial. But in the issue of lead in the city’s drinking water, lives are at stake and denial is a criminal offense.
William Hart, the director of “Lead and Copper,” carefully and honestly documents the sad factors leading up to one of the greatest public health disasters in American history. He begins by showing how Flint’s crisis began with poverty. He also procured the powerful testimony of LeeAnne Walters’s who begins with: “You don’t mess with my family.”
It is Walters who contacted Dr. Marc Edwards at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. Edwards, a civil engineering/environmental professor and expert on water treatment and corrosion, already had a stellar record diagnosing and designing a plan for the 2003-10 lead poisoning case in Washington, D.C. (Wikipedia).
Hart shows that Edwards was the right man to call. Speaking with a disarming tie depicting a savanna scene with elephants, Edwards easily explains the problems with aging pipes, even showing a $5,000 sample, and how some kinds of water treatment systems can lead to corrosion and poisoning.
Hart, originally a filmmaker for celebrity projects, visited Flint in 2016 during the height of its water crisis for Yahoo News. He writes: “I saw the chain of events that contributed to thousands of people, mainly children, being irreversibly poisoned. The removal of democracy in an already neglected city, the failure of the state to acknowledge or act on a solution until citizens stood up, and the massive attempt to cover up the damage being done to this population’s health is a timeless crisis.”
But this, my friends, is not why I took a couple screen shots and rushed them to my sons. The Flint situation is the canary in the coal mine. Hundreds of districts around the US already have lead levels exceeding federal guidelines and Hart lists them in his last frames.
As Hart says, “This documentary is a warning and a call to action to hold governments accountable for their negligence.”
10/10
Credits
Director: William Hart
Producers: Alex Olsen and Patrick Letterii
Editors: William Hart and Bryan Monroe Simpson
Cinematography: Whilliam Hart, Alex Seefreid, Brandon Ivey and Corey James Taylor
Score: Jacob Bloomfield-Misrach and William Sammons.
Featuring: LeeAnne Walters, Flint Mayor Sheldon Neeley, Former Flint Mayor Dayne Walling,Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, Congressman Elijah Cummings, Dr. Marc Edwards, Dr. Riché Barnes and Dr. Phillip Atiba Goff
Released: Nov. 19, 2024
Website: https://www.leadandcopperfilm.com
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