California Ag TODAY: FIGHT FOR WATER FILM IN FRESNO NEXT WEEK

Local film 'The Fight for Water' goes International, with Additional Festival Screenings in Fresno and Bakersfield

The award-winning documentary, "The Fight for Water: A Farm Worker Struggle", which was recently nominated for Excellence in Filmmaking and was Runner Up Winner for Best Documentary in Cinematography at the Action on Film International Film Festival, will have several screenings in October and November.

The documentary, which put a human face to the historic 2009 water crisis and the environmental decision that impacted a farm working community in the Westside of the California Central Valley, has been invited to screen internationally at two major environmental film festivals: at the Kuala Lumpur Eco Film Festival in Malaysia, where it will screen alongside other award-winning environmental films from around the world on October 13, and at the Life Sciences Film Festival in Prague, Czech Republic, on October 14 - 18.

It will also screen at this year's Viña de Oro Fresno International Film Festival, which will be held October 16 - 19, 2013, at the Historic Tower Theatre in Fresno. The film, which features a historic water march that spanned across the Westside of the California Central Valley to the San Luis Reservoir by farmers and their farm workers, will screen Saturday, October 19 at 6 pm and will be the closing film of the festival, followed by an awards ceremony.

The film will then screen at the Historic Fox Theater in Bakersfield, California, as the "Official Selection" at this year's first ever Outside the Box Bakersfield Film Festival, which will be held November 8 - 10, 2013.

Hollywood actor Paul Rodriguez, who helped organize the water march in the style of Cesar Chavez, is featured in the film for his activism in this cause. Major political figures from throughout the state, and community leaders representing the Fresno community, who stood in favor and against the water cause, also appear on the film. Arnold Schwarzenegger also makes an appearance.

The film was produced by Juan Carlos Oseguera, an alumnus of San Francisco State University who has been a published film critic and has won awards and recognitions in writing, producing and directing. This is his first feature length documentary which he wrote, edited, directed and produced under his production studio, Filmunition.

The documentary features two Latino farmers, Joe Del Bosque and George Delgado, who describe how federal water measures contributed to fields going dry in the West Side of the California Central Valley in 2009 while refuges that protect a threatened fish received all of the water designated for them. This affected their community tremendously. Because of that, the governor had to declare the affected area a disaster and provide government-run food assistance for over two-hundred thousand farm working people who were displaced from their jobs.

Oseguera, 39, who was raised in the California Central Valley by parents who were migrant farmworkers, understood the struggle they were facing and set out to document the their plight as a lesson to be learned and as a voice to be heard. He wants viewers to understand that migrant farm workers are a driving force to our economy. Yet in his quest to understand this water situation, he uncovers class, racial and environmental intricacies behind water access and distribution in California, and the ripple effect it has on all of us. It is an eye opening documentary that everyone must see.