Just when you thought gasoline might be the most precious liquid on Earth, along comes water, tastelessly crowding the geo-

political stage with its own see-through brand of urgency. According to filmmaker Irena Salina and Canadian activist and author Maude Barlow, the world could run out of drinking water in our lifetime.

The scenario is played out in detail in Flow: For Love of Water, a collaborative effort between French filmmaker Salina and the Ottawa-based Barlow that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year.

"Water is the new oil," says Barlow, sitting in a posh Park City hotel in a suite that, somewhat ironically, opens up to a swimming pool.

"You would never know it as we're sitting here ... but we're actually in one of the seven states in the U.S. that is running out of water. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, Utah - along with California, New Mexico, Nevada and others - will run out of water in five to 10 years."

Barlow says that's just the beginning of the problem.

"The global water shortage means it is fast becoming a commodity ... and one that corporate interests are realizing a profit on. Water has become a huge business, and it's increasingly being controlled by a very small number of corporations, such as Vivendi and Suez," says Barlow, who backs up her argument in her book, The Blue Covenant.

Profit-minded businessmen controlling the world's water supply just seems wrong to Barlow, whose battle against the privatization of humanity's most important resource has been her central mission for the more than a decade.

It also provides one of the central narrative lines in Flow, Salina's film which features Barlow in a starring role, and is currently touring different cities in Canada, one of the first environment-specific film festivals in Canada.

Barlow, national chairperson for the Council of Canadians, says she has great hopes for Flow's ability to educate the masses because it's an issue where people tend to make a stand.

"That's why we're here. That's why this movie is so important. People need to know what's happening to our water."

Barlow believes water belongs to all human beings because it's as central to life as the air we breathe - and turning it into something that can be bought and sold for billion-dollar profits just seems immoral, she says.

And, contrary to popular assumption, the world's water is disappearing, she says - literally. "We're actually losing water from the hydrological cycle because rain has to catch something green that can sweat it back into the cycle. It's called transpiration, and we're losing so much plant life to clear-cutting, drought and deforestation, the water (molecule) is simply breaking apart and blowing away."

The water that doesn't blow away washes back into the oceans without moving through nature's filter, and the water that is left is largely contaminated with pharmaceuticals, pesticides and hormone-changing compounds that are having a profound effect on both human fertility and the incidence of various cancers.

Thus far, people haven't really been resisting Flow's core message - both Utah and California residents, by far the biggest Sundance demographic, are experiencing rationing and user-pay policies already in effect.

The bottled water industry has turned into a multi-billion dollar concern with Coca-Cola and PepsiCo standing at the top of heap, essentially draining aquifers to fill up the plastic receptacles - and setting a precedent for the money-for-water equation.