It's a neat trick, being able to set fire to water. Yet for a growing number of residents in the American south, the fun has gone out of this particular party trick. They live above an enormous gas field that stretches under one third of the country. Hydraulic fracturing, a process known as 'fracking', involves pumping toxic sludge into the ground and waiting for fractures which enable energy companies, Halliburton primarily, to extract the gas. The legislation that allows corporations to do it, and the effect felt at ground level by those who live above the wells, is at the heart of this inflammatory documentary.

So how do you set fire to water? Turn on tap, apply match, stand back. Fracking involves enormous quantities of water, most of which becomes contaminated with a cocktail of toxins and gas (hence inflammable drinking water) as it passes back into the table. The curiosity of filmmaker Josh Fox was tweaked when offered a significant sum for land he owns above the gas fields. His ire was raised when he learned more about Cheney-era legislation that freed up drilling fields dubbed 'the Saudi Arabia of natural gas', and the environmental culpability of those same companies. Companies like Halliburton who were given unfettered rights to exploit a natural resource and render living anywhere near the wells unmanageable, if not lethal.

While Gasland may sound like another Michael Moore-styled exercise in Bush-bashing, Fox engages his topic very differently. Part novel, part aesthetic argument, part film-school, its gonzo technique is as compelling as it is technically uneven. But once he gets to the gritty core of the subject – and much of this argument is exceptionally distressing – there's no walking away from the extraordinary environmental disaster that is quickly unfolding across the gas belt. Or is that the price to pay for becoming an energy superpower? Fox doesn't think so and in the end you're left feeling outraged and impotent at such corporate and government immorality, yet quietly pleased that it doesn't happen here. Or so we're told. But how would you know?

// COLIN FRASER

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