Living Downstream View Trailer 90 min, HD, in development Produced by: The PPC Producer/Director:    Chanda Chevannes Producer/Editor:         Nathan Shields

A Parable:

There once was a village overlooking a beautiful river.
The residents who lived here began noticing increasing numbers of drowning people
caught in the river’s swift current and so went to work inventing
ever more elaborate technologies to resuscitate them.

So preoccupied were these heroic villagers with rescue and treatment that
they never thought to look upstream to see who was pushing the victims in.

Living Downstream is a walk up that river.

Based on the seminal and groundbreaking book by Dr. Sandra Steingraber, this feature-length documentary (with a one-hour broadcast version) is an eloquent film about people and land, cancer and environment. Beginning with Sandra’s own unique perspective as an ecologist, poet and cancer survivor, we will travel across the breathtaking North American landscape and back in time, tracing the intertwining histories of cancer and environmental contamination.

At the heart of Living Downstream is Sandra Steingraber’s compelling story. Raised in small-town Illinois, Sandra was diagnosed with bladder cancer during her undergraduate studies in biology. She fought the disease and survived, but as she underwent painful treatments, surgeries and screenings, Sandra resolved to understand why so many otherwise healthy people from her farming community were becoming victims of cancer.

Living Downstream is a journey of scientific inquiry into three toxic chemicals – atrazine, chlorine and PCBs – and the effect they are having on our health. Through these three chemicals, this film tells the multi-dimensional story of the beauties and complexities of our environment and our bodies. We will follow these toxic chemicals as they travel to some of the most beautiful places in North America, embedding themselves into those things necessary for all life – our air, food and water. We will see how these toxins enter our bodies and how, once inside, scientists bellieve they conspire to create cancer.

Like assembling the far-flung pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, Living Downstream will piece together a compelling picture:

A truck rolls through a cornfield and sprays atrazine, a pesticide, on the earth. Less than 0.1% of pesticides actually reach their target. Depending on the chemical and the time of spraying, the remainder will stay on our food, evaporate and ascend into the jet stream, or bind to the soil and flow into our drinking water. Lab research has shown that atrazine may interfere with our hormones. In frogs, research has shown that it deforms sex hormones and creates hermaphrodites. In humans, atrazine has been linked to our most common cancers – those of the breast and prostate. Yet atrazine is currently the second most commonly used pesticide in North America.

Turn on a water faucet in 7 out of 10 North American homes, the odds are good that you will smell the chlorine. Since the early 1900’s chlorine has been added to our drinking water to prevent deadly diseases like cholera, but almost two-dozen studies have shown that chlorinated water is associated with another deadly disease. In our water, chlorine reacts with organic matter to create dangerous cancer-causing chemicals like chloroform. These waterborne toxins then invade our bodies through ingestion, inhalation of steam and absorption through our skin. Not only do environmental toxins surround us, they are within us.

Beluga whales in the St. Lawrence River develop cancer at roughly the same rates as their human neighbours. In their tissues, harmful chemicals, like PCBs, accumulate. The same is true for us. PCB production was banned in North America over 30 years ago, yet every human alive today has detectible levels of PCBs in our tissues. These potentially cancer-causing agents are even being passed from mother to child through breast-milk. Still, the vast majority of PCBs are sitting in landfills and old electrical equipment, waiting to be released into the atmosphere and eventually into our bodies, and the bodies of our children.

The science is frightening, but Living Downstream will not frighten or depress — it will illuminate and inspire. This poetic film is a meditation on the pain and destruction of cancer but also a visceral tribute to the natural world. A dire warning made hopeful by Sandra Steingraber’s incredible determination, Living Downstream is a call to action and a powerful reminder of the intimate connection between the health of our bodies and the integrity of our air, land and water.

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