Access to household water for the city’s 2 million residents sits at the centre of the story. This ties into the campaign by a local farmer to protect and conserve the city’s groundwater and the fight to stop pollution of a local wetland, river and lagoon.

In 2018, Cape Town narrowly averted completely running out of drinking water. The dry taps crisis, termed ‘Day Zero’, followed an extended drought. In a country sitting 29th on the list of water scarce places in the world, this became a ghastly harbinger of things to come. In the wake of Day Zero the city council committed to take urgent action to protect the supply of water by enforcing a policy of limited access.

Capturing Water follows the unfolding fight, led by working class activist, Faeza Meyer, to overturn Cape Town’s city council’s water cuts offs. For Faeza, the city’s strategy of cutting water to households that ‘over use’ is punitive to the Cape’s many poor and crowded dwellings. As the film follows Faeza’s quest to build a movement around water rights, the contradictions faced by a liberal city Mayor who has been pressured to self-finance major water and sanitation infrastructural spend to augment its water supply, are unpeeled.

The film features two other protagonists, both of whom are also victims of market led solutions to the water crisis. Caroline Marx is part of a community living next to a lagoon that emits a terrible stench due to poor maintenance and sewage spills. This has killed aquatic life and forced closure of the lagoon and surrounding beaches. The film follows Caroline’s use of environmental legislation to demand accountability over the sewage crisis.

Nazeer Sonday is a famer and campaigner who has been defending the city’s ground water. He successfully fends off big housing developers who are eyeing prime recharge area of the largest aquifer. Nazeer’s story takes us to the food-water nexus and the symbiosis between land and water rights, augmenting the short fall of fresh water and the polluting nature of chemical fertiliser used by large scale intensive agriculture.

As the three protagonists take on various aspects of the city council’s mistreatment of the water cycle, what is starkly revealed is the role that a full cost recovery market approach to critical services plays in maintaining South Africa’s water crisis, alongside its place as the most unequal country in the world.