In Bangla, "easy like water" translates roughly as "piece of cake." The irony is that in Bangladesh -- with 150 million people in a country the size of Iowa, water poses a relentless threat. With increasingly violent cyclones and accelerating glacier melt upstream, flooding may create 20 million Bangladeshi "climate refugees" by mid-century. India is already building walls to keep them out.
Published July 1, 2013
The Pulitzer Center -supported film "Easy Like Water" won a Spring 2013 CINE Golden Eagle Award. The film by Glenn Baker and Stephen Sapienza is part of their Pulitzer Center project Bangladesh: Easy Like Water which examines climate change and education in Bangladesh.
The film shows how Mohammed Rezwan, known as "Bangladesh's Noah," is revolutionizing education by building solar-powered, internet-enabled floating schools to overcome the problem of rising water levels and flooded schools. Rezwan's solar-powered boats are helping to bring education to rural Bangladeshis, as well as allowing many girls to go to school for the first time.
The film was edited by Sam Green with original music by James Lavino and animation by James Sullivan
As well as winning the Golden Eagle Award, CINE featured "Easy Like Water" as the cover photo on their Facebook page. Other pictures from the movie as well as of the staff are shown in a CINE Facebook album.
CINE (which stands for the Council on International Nontheatrical Events) was launched 55 years ago with the purpose of finding American films for international film festivals. CINE works to open doors for filmmakers. The Golden Eagle Award uses a jury system to choose the best among the many submitted films.
In 2012, "Easy Like Water" won the first Hilton LightStay Sustainability Award for a Work-in-Progress in a ceremony at the Sundance Film Festival. The film was selected out of the 1,500 feature-length documentaries and more than 5,000 short films that were submitted.
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"Easy Like Water," a film that documents one man's mission to help Bangladesh's schools adapt to climate change, attracts notice from television broadcasts.
Intern
Rebecca is a recent graduate from Guilford College, where she received a degree with high honors in English and Psychology. While at Guilford, she worked for the award-winning student-run newspaper...
Grantee
Glenn Baker has produced more than 40 documentaries broadcast on PBS exploring global security issues. He produced and directed “Stand Up: Muslim American Comics Come of Age” for the PBS series “...
Pulitzer Center staff
Steve Sapienza is an award-winning news and documentary producer who has covered a wide range of human security stories in dozens of countries, including the HIV crisis in Haiti and the Dominican...