Water Stories: From Permission to Wisdom with the World Water Film Festival, Lo-TEK Institute & Brave Blue World Foundation

Water Stories is a new collaborative initiative between the World Water Film Festival, the Lo-TEK Institute, and the Brave Blue World Foundation, built on a single conviction: that the world's most urgent water challenges will only be addressed when diverse knowledge systems are brought into genuine relationship - and when more people are invited to see water not as a resource to be managed, but as a living system we are part of. On the evening of Thursday, September 24th, we invite you to the launch of Water Stories at reSOUND at HERO, Rockefeller Center - one of New York City's most extraordinary immersive art spaces. The program opens with the short film Water Guardians, following a diverse group of young surfers in New York City reclaiming their relationship with the ocean, and sets the tone for an evening about belonging, resilience, and what becomes possible when community comes together around water; it is up to our collective energy to create a positive outcome, and not feel doomed and frozen by the scale of the work necessary. Julia Watson, founder of the Lo-TEK movement and co-founder of the Lo-TEK Institute, will deliver the keynote address on how Indigenous communities around the world have engineered living, nature-based water systems that outperform modern infrastructure in resilience, cost, and ecological health. The film program that follows draws from two of the world's leading water storytelling libraries: a curated excerpt from Brave Blue World Foundation's ‘Our Blue World’ with a spotlight on ‘Sponge Cities’, and the World Water Film Festival short ‘Little Town with a Big Heart’ - the story of Lynchburg, South Carolina, a community of 300 people navigating a water crisis with hope, community and courage. These two short films give voices to communities of people with lived knowledge, dignity, and the right to be heard on their own terms. The panel asks how film, storytelling, and education can be ethical, reciprocal, and regenerative; how can they honor local context and community agency while helping the wider public, institutions, and funders understand what is at stake? Listening to the people and the lands they live with changes the way we imagine interventions. From there, we can ask what it takes for a community to assess, choose, fund, operate, and sustain water and wastewater solutions suited to its own place, ecology, needs, and aspirations. Community perspectives, filmmakers, advocates, and nature-based and wastewater experts will come together not to prescribe a one-size-fits-all answer, but to explore how storytelling, local knowledge, technical rigor, education, long-term stewardship, and conscious capital can support resilient water futures. These are powerful examples for the panel because it connects ancestral knowledge, nature-based design and modern communal resilience, while also showing how a compelling story and a different way of imagining our relationship with water can ultimately influence the way towns and cities are designed. MODERATOR AND FEATURED PANELISTS Sherry Bradley – BBUWP Executive Director Christopher Banks Carr – Founder, Black Land Ownership · Advisor, Lo-TEK Institute Mark Nelson – Director and Chairman Emeritus of the Institute of Ecotechnics and head of Wastewater Gardens International Paul O'Callaghan – CEO BlueTech Research & Brave Blue World Foundation Erin Riggs – Director of the Environmental Finance Center at the US Water Alliance Julia Watson – Founder, Lo-TEK Movement