Take one still: booking interviews, going south

Today I had a meeting with Reem al-Masri from 7iber, the leading jordanian alternative news and analysis source. Reem is working with a 7iber project called "once upon a water in jordan" which is a play on words in arabic to once upon a time.. what they do is arrange location shooting for social media activists, photographers, film crews etc, to report on different local stories, which they produce later for their own web and for different screenings.

This is their facebook page.

The meeting was very successful, we went through what they've done and what they'd like to do, and we agreed that they will help me arrange interviews tomorrow at the Ministry of Water which will lead to a trip to the controversial DISI project site in the south of Jordan (a 3-4 hour drive from my current location). The project is deemed as a solution to jordan's water woes, although totally unsustainable, as it will pump water from a ground water basin in the south desert along hundreds of kilometres to the capital - something that really pissed off the local inhabitants of that area, as they don't even get to do construction work, which is done by a Turkish contractor. Another controversy that arose recently were claims by a study group that water in the disi aquifer were contaminated and radioactive, the claims were shrugged off as a political play from Israel who wants Jordan to stay dependent on the jordan river basin, shared with Israel, and on the possibility (almost none) of going ahead with the red-dead project, pumping water from the red sea into the dead sea and desalinating a fair amount of that water for municipal use (check map).

IT will be interesting to interview the people down south, and then put their questions in front of the officials in the capital for answers. This bit of the film will be produced together with 7iber for a seperate screening in November, details are still to be concluded.

Things are just moving along!