After a full day of presentations and science-based lectures, attendees from Utah State University's Spring Runoff Conference gathered with students and community members to watch an award-winning documentary showcasing water and its many stories.
This free screening of "Watermark" was hosted by USU's Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art on March 31 in the Eccles Conference Center.
Before the screening, the art museum’s director Katie Lee Koven addressed the question looming in the audience: why was the art museum partnering on this film screening?
“Film is possibly the most accessible art form of our times," Lee Koven said to the diverse audience of scientists and artists.
"Documentaries can be an extraordinary medium in providing information, providing a viewpoint, making people aware of subject matter, and even possibly moving us to the point of changing our views or changing our behavior,” she said.
Alongside the Utah Film Center, the art department sponsored "Watermark" in conjunction with Natural Resources Week, the Spring Runoff Conference and USU’s “Year of Water” celebration.
The visual narrative of the documentary commented on the question photographer Edward Burtynsky posed in the film: "How does water shape us and how do we shape water?"
Stories ranging from a dry wasteland that was once the rich Colorado River delta to a crowded Ganges filled with Hindus washing away their sins were highlighted in the film.
Audience member and watershed science professor Nancy Mesner thoroughly enjoyed the film. “I thought it was lovely; I thought it was luscious; I thought it conveyed the sort of vastness of water in time and space,” she said.
