“The Shape of Water” is a feature documentary that tells the stories of powerful, imaginative and visionary women confronting the destructive development of the Third World with new cultures and a passion for change. The film takes us to Senegal, Israel/Palestine, Brazil, and India where these new cultures, alongside old traditions, end female genital cutting (FGC), offer innovative forms of opposition to the Israeli occupation of Palestine, and show how women are spearheading the implementation of renewable resources and rainforest preservation by tapping trees to obtain rubber.”The Shape of Water” also takes us to a vast co-operative of rural women in India (SEWA) and, in the foothills of the Himalayas, to a farm, Navdanya, set up to preserve biodiversity and women’s role as seed keepers. By interweaving images, words, and the actions of Khady, Bilkusben, Oraiza, Dona Antonia, and Gila “The Shape of Water” offers fresh and nuanced insights into the lives of women in the Third World.

Filmmaker Kum-Kum Bhavnani is a sociologist at the University of California Santa Barbara, where her teaching and research focuses on racism, feminism, and women in prison and development studies. She has given invited keynote addresses include presentations in South Africa, Brazil, and Sweden, as well as at Yale. Her connection to South Africa is particularly noteworthy, and includes stints as an International Observer in the 1994 national elections in South Africa and as an invited participant at the World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa in 2001. She holds a Ph.D. from Kings College in Cambridge, United Kingdom.

The Honourable Mary Robinson, the first woman President of Ireland and formerly the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, has spent most of her life as a human rights advocate. She now chairs the Council of Women World Leaders and is a member of the Global Commission on International Migration. President Robinson was named a "Hero and Icon" as one of Time Magazine's 2005 top 100 men and women whose "power, talent or moral example is transforming the world." As an academic, legislator and barrister, she has always sought to use law as an instrument for social change, arguing landmark cases before the European Court of Human Rights as well as in the Irish courts and the European Court in Luxembourg. In 1988 Mary Robinson and her husband, Nicholas Robinson, founded the Irish Centre for European Law at the University of Dublin, and since 1998 she has been Chancellor of the University. Based in New York, President Robinson is currently leading The Ethical Globalization Initiative (EGI), supported by a partnership of the Aspen Institute, Columbia University (where she is a professor of practice) and the Swiss based International Council on Human Rights Policy. Its goal is to bring the norms and standards of human rights into the globalization process and to support capacity building in good governance in developing countries. A Council of Goodwill Ambassador, she also serves on the International Commission of Jurists and is Extraordinary Professor at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. The recipient of numerous honors and awards throughout the world, President Robinson is a member of the Royal Irish Academy and the American Philosophical Society and is Honorary President of Oxfam International as well as Penal Reform International. A member of the Club of Madrid - a group of former heads of state and government, she serves on many boards including the Vaccine Fund, and chairs the Irish Chamber Orchestra.

Sister Lorraine Garasu is a member of the Congregation of the Sisters of Nazareth (CSN) and Coordinator of the Bougainville Inter-Church Women's Forum (BICWF). She has participated in peace negotiations both in Bougainville (an Island between Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands) and overseas. From the early days of the Bougainville crisis, women's groups played important roles in initiatives to end the violence and promote a sustainable solution to the conflict. Women of all political, religious and regional groupings mobilised and spoke out for peace. We prayed, marched and negotiated for peace and reconciliation. BICWF grew out of the strong tradition among women in Bougainville of organizing within their churches. By drawing in "non-politicized women" and as a pan-Bougainvillean and ecumenical organization, the BICWF complemented the work of the Provincial Council of Women and their district structures. The BICWF carried out dialogue work in northern Bougainville with the Bougainville Resistance Army, the Papua New Guinea government and the Papua New Guinea Defence Force on various human rights abuses against civilians.

Iain Campbell Smith worked for the peacekeepers as a diplomat, radio broadcaster and musician whose peace songs became famous on the Island. His work on Bougainville is the subject of the documentary film Bougainville Sky. Over the last 5 years songwriter Iain Campbell Smith has spent time working in the war ravaged islands of the South Pacific. He was sent to the islands by the Australian Foreign Ministry, learned pidgin dialects and began writing songs, in both English and pidgin, from the stories of the people he worked with as they struggled to build trust and peace after a bitter war. Smith spoke at the University of Idaho in September, 2006 as part of the Martin Forum series. He spent three days speaking about lessons that can be learned from peacekeeping operations in the South Pacific, about the role that culturally relevant activities such as music can play in the peace building process, and about representing your government abroad. He also performed a concert at local folk music venue The Attic.

Cynthia Enloe grew up on Long Island and received a Ph.D. from the University of California/Berkeley, has served as chair of Clark's Government Department and Director of Women's Studies. Professor Enloe is currently a Research Professor in the IDCE Department and teaches the intensive seven-week seminar, "Gender, Militarization, and Development". She has been awarded Clark's "Outstanding Teacher of the Year" three times and has been named the University Senior Faculty Fellow for Excellence in Teaching and Scholarship. Enloe's feminist teaching and research has focused on the interplay of women's politics in the national and international arenas, with special attention to how women's labor is made cheap in globalized factories (especially sneaker factories) and how women's emotional and physical labor has been used to support government's war-waging policies and how many women have tried to resist both of those efforts. Racial, class, ethnic, and national identities and pressures shaping ideas about femininities and masculinities have been common threads throughout her studies. In recent years, Enloe has been invited to lecture and give special seminars on feminism, militarization, and globalization in Japan, Korea, Turkey, Canada, Britain and numerous colleges across the U.S. She has written for Ms. Magazine and Village Voice and has appeared on National Public Radio and the BBC. She serves on the editorial boards of several scholarly journals, including Signs and the International Feminist Journal of Politics. Among her nine books are: The Morning After: Sexual Politics at the End of the Cold War (1993), Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (2000), Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives (2000), and The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in a New Age of Empire, (2004). All of these are published by the University of California Press (www.ucpress.edu).