Angela Bassett on the Water Problem | Breakthrough

A beautiful Earth is covered roughly 70% with water, but only 1% of that is usable by humans for consuming. Water is one of those elements that we need to exist, like oxygen. Coming to this project, one of the things that I've learned is that there's no one solution to the water problem, but there are many. A dialogue about each is important to have.

I would most like this film to be an impetus for inspiring young creative minds, or even mature minds, to come up with innovative ideas to help solve our water problem. First, we have to think about it. We have to be concerned about it. We have to know that there is a problem.

This film is one of contrast. We find a community in California and Arizona where a lifestyle needs to be maintained, that a vast beautiful golf courses and city parks. It's an absolute desert, but somehow they have found a way with money and resources to maintain their particular lifestyle.

But also we find ourselves in Ethiopia, where just two gallons of water a day consumed by individuals requires a six-mile journey to retrieve it. If you're too tired or you're too ill and you can't make that journey, then you are just forced to drink what's before you, and oftentimes that's not clean, it's not fresh water. This means you find a host of illnesses that crop up, basically, the old tale of the haves and the have-nots with water.

It's really basic: we either have fresh clean water and we live, or we don't have it and we perish. All over the world, there are great minds and big hearts who are coming up with ideas and solutions to this increasing problem of lack of water. I see breakthroughs happening all over the world. Wherever there's man and woman and ingenuity and ideas and curiosity and strength of purpose, there are solutions.