This is, BuzzFeed News noted recently, a time when “only the last 72 hours seem to matter in politics”. It is the age of news as instant gratification, with goldfish-like attention spans measured out in alerts and tweets on unputdownable phones. A week can seem like a year, a year can seem like a lifetime.
So it is reassuring to consider a project such as Flint, a documentary film five years in the making. The director, Anthony Baxter, was holed up for long periods at the Holiday Inn Express in Flint, Michigan, capturing 400 hours of footage about one of the worst human-caused environmental disasters in American history.
This monumental testimonial has been pared down to a devastating two-hour feature that has its US premiere at the Environmental Film Festival in Washington earlier this month. It is a story of environmental law-breaking, months of cover-up and the most powerful country in the world poisoning tens of thousands of its own. It is also a timely parable about what happens when trust breaks down.
“We’re in a post-truth world,” Professor Marc Edwards of Virginia Tech University, who helped expose the water crisis, tells Baxter while driving one night. “That’s what this whole story’s about. Who betrayed whom. Everyone’s betraying everyone. Who can you trust? There’s some folks telling the truth, there’s some folks lying and, to me, this defines a dark age. We live in a dark age. It’s defined by not knowing who you can trust in a society that runs on trust.”
Flint, a former car manufacturing boom town that fell into economic decline, tried to save money in 2014 by taking its water supply from the Flint River but did not treat it to reduce a corrosive effect on old pipes. As a consequence, lead leached into the system, causing a public health catastrophe. Blood tests found children had high levels of lead; reading scores in Flint have subsequently fallen by 50%, according to the state education department.
Mona Hanna-Attisha, a pediatrician, tells the film: “Lead passes your blood-brain barrier. It’s a neurotoxin; it causes irreversible brain damage. So detecting it in children is too late. It is that canary in the coalmine: it’s already too late. We have just altered the life course trajectory of an entire generation of Flint children.”
Experts also linked the water to legionnaires’ disease, a type of pneumonia. Residents of Flint – where two in five people live in poverty – are still fighting in the Michigan supreme court for the right to sue state officials. In the film’s opening sequence, the narrator, Alec Baldwin, says: “This is the story of what happens next.”
Baxter recalls: “The New York Times did a piece and it was just everywhere on the news but what was interesting for me was that once the cameras left, and you know how news cycles work, it was even more important, I felt, to stay with it because these families were really on their own and living in a situation where trust had broken down completely.
“In a way, it reminds me of the coronavirus situation. You’ve got this situation with people not trusting what they’re being told by those in authority. When this vacuum of mistrust is created, it’s impossible for people to know what to believe and it was a really compelling thing for me to follow.”
Baxter, 50, based in Montrose in the UK, is best known for documentaries including You’ve Been Trumped, A Dangerous Game, Dark Side of the Greens and You’ve Been Trumped Too. He never imagined that Flint would become such an all-consuming project.
“Like a lot of people, I thought the problem would be fixed pretty quickly, there would be a solution found, the pipes would be replaced and there’d be federal government money. People were comparing it at the time to [Hurricane] Katrina and the thought was that the federal government would act. I, at the time, thought this will be a film that I would hope to finish in a couple of years’ time and then the story will be resolved.”
It did not turn out that way. “A number of pipes have been replaced, sure, but the people of Flint wanted all the pipes replaced. They wanted every single bit of lead pulled out of the ground. I think if that had happened then it would have been a real physical sign to people that the federal government was doing everything it could to rebuild that trust. But instead it was just left to the people. All they got was bottles of water.”
The film-maker’s patient, long-term approach enabled him to persuade residents to open up. There was Nakiya Wakes, whose water supply was cut off by the city because she refused to pay, forcing her to stockpile bottles. There was Jeremiah Loren, who at 12 suffered skin rashes and itches resembling chicken pox as well as changes in personality. His mother, Tammy Loren, is close to tears as she tells Baxter: “As a mother, it breaks my heart, because there’s nothing I can do.” Some of the footage was used by Michael Moore, a Flint native, in his feature Fahrenheit 11/9.
Speaking by phone ahead of his promotional tour in the US, Baxter reflects: “You build that trust up with a community. They perhaps saw me at the beginning as a bit of a quirky individual in that I had this strange British accent, but in a way it gives me access to situations with families that perhaps an American reporter wouldn’t have in the same way. I don’t take that trust lightly at all and that’s why I felt so determined to get the film completed, even though it’s obviously taken much longer than I expected it to originally.”
There are plenty of twists and turns. The actor Mark Ruffalo arrives with his not-for-profit environmental group Water Defense, whose “citizen scientist” (or “pseudo-scientist” to critics) Scott Smith carries out “tests” and argues that showering is dangerous; he later admits mistakes and turns tetchy in an interview with Baxter.
Barack Obama visits Flint but uncharacteristically misjudges the mood. Astonishingly, mid-speech, he asks for a glass of water, then seeks to reassure the audience that it is not a stunt. His popularity in this majority-black city nosedives. Baxter says: “I think the African American community in Flint just felt so devastated by that. There was so much hope placed on Obama’s visit and to see him misread the situation in that way was really surprising.”
Flint’s water no longer comes from the river and has improved, but some wary residents continue to use bottled water. Baxter himself faced that dilemma during his long stays there.
“I would shower in the water but I wouldn’t drink the filtered water and today, if I go there and I’m staying in the hotel, I would still drink bottled water, even though I’m told that it’s safe. And that’s me as a visitor. If you’re a resident there, you can just understand the dilemma that they’re in constantly over this thing.”
As a story of official negligence that hits poor people and people of colour the hardest, perhaps the closest analogue is Grenfell Tower, a 120-home tower block in London that caught fire in June 2017, killing 72 people. Its plastic-filled aluminium cladding has been identified as the principal cause.
Baxter recalls: “When the residents were marching down to the Flint city hall saying, ‘We’re getting skin rashes, we’re having hair loss, we don’t trust the water and then we’re being told it’s safe,’ I remember reading how the Grenfell residents were concerned about this cladding and the emergency situation in the tower, and they made these points very forcefully, but nobody seemed to listen to them.
“That is what happened in Flint. People were really hammering down the doors saying, ‘Look, this is not right and we don’t trust what we’re being told.’ They were just being told, ‘Well, your water is safe, look, I’m drinking it on television’ – that was the mayor at the time. So again it was down to them to fight their corner. When I was in Flint and the Grenfell Tower fire happened, I remember thinking that this is America’s Grenfell on the ground.”
Flint will be released later this year