Documentaries and Environmental Justice: The Analysis of the Documentaries Related to Water Crisis in Iran

In today’s visualized world, documentaries can reveal some aspects of human life, society’s perception and human civilization’s attitude towards it. Each frame narrates and frames environmental issues in its own way and influences responsible behavior towards the environment in different ways, which can be indicative of a social or media attitude towards the issue. This study aims to answer the question of how documentaries about the water crisis in Iran have placed the issue within the framework of environmental justice and has examined in detail how these documentaries use this framework. To achieve this goal, 22 documentaries from the 2000s and 2010s were studied using the theory of frame analysis. It indicates that the environmental justice frame does not appear very often in these films. In the films that show the issue in the context of environmental justice, the axis of “inequality in social causes of environmental conditions” is based on natural causes and blaming the environment as something self-sufficient, independent, powerful, and beyond human control, without mentioning the human causes of drought. In the context of “inequality in the consequences of environmental conditions,” this framework shows the unequal distribution of development benefits or climate change by showing the details of people’s lives on the ground and comparing the situation before and after the moment of disaster in their lives. Here, the environment is the “source of use” of people, which is exploited in an unequal way, and the affected people are powerless and passive. The “axis of inequality” is absent in the consequences of “environmental policy and management” and the social problems and conflicts around environmental degradation policies have no place in the framework of the documentaries. The general frame of these documentaries, according to the definition of “us and them,” is often based on the geographical division within a national unit.