Filmmaker promotes discourse about water, drugs.
Courtesy photo Conrad Weaver, a documentary filmmaker who spent the past year screening a film about water shortages in the West, is currently at work on another that isn’t overtly agricultural but still has an indirect tie that might be of particular interest in a state like Colorado that led the way in legalizing marijuana.
By Candace Krebs / Contributing Writer Conrad Weaver, a documentary filmmaker who spent the past year screening a film about water shortages in the West, is currently at work on another that isn’t overtly agricultural but still has an indirect tie that might be of particular interest in a state like Colorado that led the way in legalizing marijuana.
Weaver has become familiar to agricultural audiences for his work on a pair of documentaries that began with the “Great American Wheat Harvest,” which followed custom harvesters on their annual migration bringing in the crop.
Over the past year, Weaver has screened the film at multiple venues across the region, starting with the world premiere held at the University of Nebraska’s Water for Food Global Conference last April.
“There’s been lots of interest in the film, and lots of great discussions, and that’s really what I intended for it to do,” he said.
“The drought map may be clear today, but tomorrow or next year it could come back, and we need to be ready,” Weaver said.
By September, he plans to finish a new documentary examining the heroin epidemic in his local community outside the greater Washington, D.C., area.
He considers marijuana a gateway drug that has helped fuel a nationwide drug epidemic.
Last year 52,000 Americans died from drug overdoses, and the problem exists everywhere, including in rural communities, he said.