When Will Parrinello was a senior in high school in New York, he read Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road.” It inspired him to travel out West and explore the country as Kerouac did.

Years later, his love of Kerouac would lead him to meet his longtime filmmaking partner, Mill Valley’s John Antonelli, while collaborating on a film on Kerouac in the 1980s. While working out of an office in Mill Valley, Parrinello fell in love with Marin and settled down in the county — but his travels didn’t stop there.

For 20 years, the filmmaking pair have traveled throughout the world to create films about the winners of the Goldman Environmental Prize, an annual recognition for grassroots environmental activists. This work would inspire Parrinello to create “Water for Life,” a documentary film about three Indigenous activists in Latin America who work to save their precious water resources from being used for mining and hydroelectric projects.

“We’re in a position to help these people tell their stories and create the kind of change that we want to see in the world,” he said. “It’s made us more aware, and I’d like to say better people because we’re more tuned in to what’s happening environmentally, and every environmental story has a social and political component to it.”

The film surrounds Berta Cáceres, a leader of the Lenca people in Honduras; Francisco Pineda, a subsistence farmer in El Salvador; and Alberto Curamil, an Indigenous Mapuche leader in Chile. It is available online through pbs.org/show/water-for-life as well as the PBS app.

“In telling stories of environmental activists, I saw the kind of impunity that was happening, what was taking place with people who don’t matter to corporations and to governments that are being corrupted by multinational corporations. They become expendable. The violence and the impunity against activists, to me, was really unconscionable. I thought these stories need to be told,” said the Greenbrae resident, whose film was shown at the Mill Valley Film Festival in 2023, where it was named an audience favorite, and Larkspur’s Lark Theater earlier this year.

The documentary is a production of Parrinello and Antonelli’s Mill Valley Film Group in association with Latino Public Broadcasting.

“In Latin America, environmental defenders are putting their lives on the line to protect their resources,” said Sandie Viquez Pedlow, Latino Public Broadcasting’s executive director, in a press release. “This powerful film shows us what these communities are up against and honors their courage and sacrifices.”

Shot in 11 years, the film showcases the activists’ causes and journeys but also the risks involved with going against governments and big corporations.

For example, Curamil was seriously injured during a protest against the burning of a Mapuche home in 2021, and, in 2016, Cáceres was murdered in her home about a year after winning the Goldman Environmental Prize. After her death, two other local activists were killed in the same month.

“It was important to show not just that they succeeded, and put these icons on a pedestal, but to show the price that they pay. Sadly for Berta Cáceres, she gave her life. She always knew that there was that risk. She was really smart and really adept at protecting herself. We never thought they would get her. It seemed important to tell stories of people who are human, but are heroic at the same time in my mind,” he said.

Cáceres’ death had a big impact on Parrinello and the rest of the team.

“We asked Berta’s family, ‘Should we even be making the film? Should we be doing this work? Does it have any impact?’ And Berta’s family said, ‘Come on, of course it matters. Berta would want us to keep carrying forward.’”

In the film, it shows that her daughters, who were studying out of the country for their protection, return to Honduras to continue their mother’s work on various environmental issues.

According to United Kingdom-based Global Witness, an organization that investigates environmental and human rights abuses, more than 2,000 activists have been murdered globally since 2012, the year they first started reporting this data. Many of those people are from Latin America.

“The reality is that what’s happening in Latin America is happening around the world: the exploitation of resources against the will of the people who have the rights to their land, often Indigenous people by multinational corporations who are corrupting governments in order to get access to those resources. And people’s lives are being destroyed,” he said. “The film is a jumping off point for those kinds of conversations.”

Taking shape

Growing up on the East Coast, Parrinello, the descendant of Sicilian immigrants, felt connected to the natural world around him. His paternal grandfather was a fisherman who had a love and respect for the sea and never took more than what was needed. His maternal grandfather was an avid gardener. He bought the vacant lot next to his house and turned it into a garden.

Through his work with the Goldman Environmental Prize, he began to see water as something that was — and would be — taken advantage of.

“I’m seeing more and more that water is becoming an issue,” he said. “That’s the main reason I was drawn to the story because I knew that water was next. As one of the protagonists in the film told me off the record, ‘What’s next, air?’ Water is a commodity in Chile. Water rights are bought and sold. For the Mapuche people in Chile, they have the water, they have rivers going through their territory, but they don’t have the right to that water. It should be a resource that everyone gets to use.”

Moving forward

Parrinello’s work has helped keep him optimistic — despite hearing President Donald Trump say he wants to “drill, baby, drill.”

“There was a sense of hopelessness in general about the environment, about human rights and social justice because the battles are so great. And we seem to be losing those battles year after year after year. And yet, every year, I’m around six people who have succeeded in creating positive change in fighting to protect a river, a bay, a forest, an endangered species.”

But if he’s learned one thing through making this film, it’s that one person really can make a difference. “It’s scary, it’s overwhelming, but what I do know is that there are tens and hundreds of thousands of people out there who are going to create change, that are gonna stand up, that aren’t going to cower.”