Solving the human race’s worsening water problem requires overcoming what Yu’s film terms the “Hydro-Illogical Cycle,” which is defined by the belief that because most of the Earth’s surface is covered in wet stuff, there’s no problem. As one horrified woman proclaims in a hilarious segment that explores the possibility of marketing recycled and purified sewage water (to be sold under the brand name Porcelain Springs), “This says to me that there’s some shortage I don’t know about. When they show those photographs from space, there’s a lot of water!”

“Last Call at the Oasis” is the latest social-advocacy documentary from Participant Media, whose previous output includes “An Inconvenient Truth,” “Food, Inc.” and “Waiting for ‘Superman,’” along with many other less obvious (and less successful) films. Like most of those movies, it’s adapted from existing material in another format, in this case journalist Alex Prud’homme’s book “The Ripple Effect.” At its best, Participant has been able to marry a message-delivery system to a genuine cinematic experience, and that’s definitely what Yu — an eclectic talent whose work includes the documentary “In the Realms of the Unreal” and the narrative feature “Ping Pong Playa,” along with numerous TV episodes — delivers here. “Oasis” packs in a lot of dire information, but it wraps it in often-spectacular images and cutting-edge graphics, moving from Las Vegas to rural Michigan to the Australian outback to the nearly depleted waters of the Jordan River, where the traditional baptismal spot of Jesus has become a fetid swamp contaminated with sewage from a nearby Israeli town.

While the discussion in “Last Call at the Oasis” is never directly about partisan politics or ideology, and although Yu relies mostly on the testimony of respected scientists, this film probably faces a version of the “Inconvenient Truth” problem. It’s largely preaching to the converted, in the sense that if you fail to accept certain basic premises — that climate change is a scientific fact, for example, and that fresh water is a limited and fragile resource that is nearly maxed out on a global scale — then you’ll just blow this off as left-wing fearmongering. In one especially effective section, Yu shows us file footage of Sean Hannity and Sarah Palin ostentatiously taking the side of Latino farmers in California’s Central Valley who were denied irrigation water because of an endangered fish called the Delta smelt. Then she has a scientist explain the larger context: Yes, the smelt is an insignificant species in and of itself, but you can’t consider it on its own. In fact, it’s a key indicator species in an enormous interlocking ecosystem that extends from the rivers and estuaries of the inland West to San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean. If the smelt dies, that tells us the whole system is dying.

“Last Call at the Oasis” follows a familiar pattern seen in Participant productions and other social-issue docs, but it does so with such panache and visual variety that I really never felt lectured at. About three-quarters of the film lays out an immensely complicated set of problems and argues that they’re all connected. Agriculture and overdevelopment in the West and Southwest have drained the regions’ reservoirs and aquifers nearly dry, while in many wetter heartland areas the groundwater has been poisoned with exotic industrial toxins and antibiotic-laced cattle manure. Americans’ growing use of all sorts of supplements and pharmaceuticals — many with unknown long-term effects — has created a problem for municipal sewage treatment facilities, which are set up to remove trash and organic waste, not unknown chemical compounds.

Then, of course, Yu has to make the case that it’s not too late for us to clean up this precious resource — along with sunlight, the one absolutely necessary component of life on Earth — and learn to share it better. Erin Brockovich leads a campaign on behalf of poisoned homeowners in Midland, Texas, that leads to new regulations on hexavalent chromium in drinking water. (Yu does not fail to mention that Midland is George W. Bush’s adopted hometown.) The Israeli town stops pumping poop into a Christian holy site, and a coalition of Jordanian, Palestinian and Israeli activists work on a plan to share the Jordan River’s water. Many people, the marketing firm discovers, can be convinced to try Porcelain Springs. (The water we drink every day is recycled sewage, too — we just don’t know where or when it happened.)

If anything, the real downside of “Last Call at the Oasis” comes after the movie is over, when you think back over the rather thin optimism of the last 20 minutes. Sure, Los Angeles will supposedly start piping recycled tap water by the end of this decade, and that’s great and all. But that does nearly nothing to address the fact that only about 1 percent of the planet’s water is drinkable, and 80 to 90 percent of that is used to grow food, often in agricultural regions (like the Central Valley of California) that would otherwise be barren. In case you’re wondering about desalinating seawater, by the way, the answer is no. (It’s like the hydrogen-car solution to the energy crisis, an expensive boondoggle that won’t work.) So we need to figure out how to use a lot less water, very quickly, with a rapidly growing population. Or we just shrug our shoulders and agree with Famiglietti’s two-word prognosis.

“Last Call at the Oasis” is now playing at the Lincoln Plaza Cinema and Sunshine Cinema in New York, and at the Landmark in Los Angeles, with wider release to follow.

A Park Avenue society girl turned Greenwich Village beatnik, Clarke was the pioneering female director in the early history of American independent film, good friends with John Cassavetes, Frederick Wiseman, Jonas Mekas and other downtown legends of the period. If her name and her films have virtually disappeared from history, that’s partly due to institutional sexism, no doubt, and partly to bad luck and bad timing. Milestone Films, which is releasing this version of “The Connection” restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archive, will go on to release Clarke’s 1960s documentaries “Robert Frost: A Quarrel With the World” and “Portrait of Jason,” an interview with a black gay street hustler, along with her 1985 comeback film “Ornette: Made in America,” about jazz legend Ornette Coleman. (Clarke died in 1997.)

“The Connection,” Clarke’s first feature, was a high-profile project, the screen adaptation of a 1959 Living Theater play by Jack Gelber that had become a cause célèbre despite scathing reviews, attracting uptown artistic types like Leonard Bernstein, Salvador Dalì and Lillian Hellman to take a walk on the wild side. Clarke and her producer, Lewis Allen, funded the film’s $177,000 budget — not so meager, at the time — through the then-unknown tactic of collecting small sums from a large number of investors, establishing a model that endures in micro-budget and mid-budget filmmaking to this day. (Weirdly enough, as Manohla Dargis has reported in the New York Times, former Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum’s parents were among the investors, along with Norman Mailer and architect Philip Johnson.)

But once completed, “The Connection” only screened twice at a single theater on Manhattan’s 45th Street before being closed by New York State’s censorship board. I’m not sure which is more amazing: the fact that New York had a censorship board in the early ’60s that could control what movies the public saw, or the reason for the seizure of “The Connection,” which was two or three uses of the word “shit” (as a synonym for drugs). By the time some edits were made and the ban lifted, public interest had faded, largely because of a swath of unrebutted hostile reviews. Bosley Crowther of the Times, a noted get-off-my-lawn crank of the time, wrote an especially peculiar one in which he praised the actors, the live jazz soundtrack and Clarke’s “bold direction,” but described the film overall as “deadly monotonous, in addition to being sordid and disagreeable.”

I won’t pretend not to understand what Crowther was talking about. “The Connection” remains much better known among jazz fans for its soundtrack album featuring pianist Freddie Redd and saxophonist Jackie McLean (who play live in the film, as they did onstage), than it is among movie buffs as, you know, a film. Clarke should certainly get credit for exploring the faux-documentary format decades before it became a film-school gimmick (the story-within-a-story premise was already present in Gelber’s play), but the first 10 minutes or so of “The Connection” are decidedly awkward. Squaresville white filmmaker Jim Dunn (William Redfield) wanders around in his high-waisted chinos, trying to convince the group of crashed-out junkie hipsters to “act natural” and “be themselves,” and assuring them that he’s studied the documentaries of Robert Flaherty and knows what he’s doing. (A dig at the old-school variety of documentary film, before cinéma-vérité, I guess.) It’s clear that the addicts would rather relate to Dunn’s hipper African-American cameraman, J.J. Burden (an early role for future Hollywood character actor Roscoe Lee Browne), who is rarely seen but makes occasional oracular pronouncements.

In the interests of art, Dunn has apparently agreed to finance a major purchase from a smack dealer named Cowboy, but for most of the movie we are obviously encouraged to ponder the similarities between drug culture and Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot,” and to wonder whether Cowboy will ever show up at all. Prowling the dingy, open flat restlessly — it looks disconcertingly like a group household I actually lived in, 20-odd years ago — Clarke’s camera introduces us to the all-male assemblage, in fragmentary interviews. Leach (Warren Finnerty), a wiry, whiny fellow who looks and acts alarmingly like the young Steve Buscemi, is the official tenant. He is troubled by a painful boil on his neck, which may symbolize the fact that the other denizens suspect him of being gay. As his black friend Sam (Jim Anderson) will tell him later, he’d be more relaxed if he could “get with the whole homosexual scene.”

There’s also Ernie (Garry Goodrow), an embittered-genius West Coast white jazzman who has hocked his horn to buy junk, and Solly (Jerome Raphael), an educated, middle-class Jewish guy who has thrown it all away for philosophical reasons, or none at all. McLean, Redd, bass player Michael Mattos and drummer Larry Richie get fewer lines, but every so often pick up their instruments to deliver angled, edgy blasts of early-’60s hard bop. Today these characters would presumably be obsessed by some other cultural form — hip-hop or Scandinavian black metal or YouTube clips or hockey fights or something else I’ve never even heard of — and they’d be able to badger Cowboy with illiterate texts every few minutes. But they’d basically be the same guys; Gelber’s characters are drawn so sharply that many 21st-century viewers will identify people they know or used to know (perhaps even people they used to be).

When Cowboy finally arrives (played by Carl Lee, who would become Clarke’s longtime partner), he turns out to be the archetypal “hip Negro” in Ray-Ban shades, sporting a blazing white outfit and a messianic mien, and bringing with him an old-lady evangelist, as comic relief and cover story. He brings other kinds of blessings too, the kind that allow this cast of semi-lovable, self-destructive losers to get through another day. The central conflict faced by the characters in “The Connection” doesn’t have much to do with heroin, though — that too is a symbol or synecdoche. It goes way back before Clarke’s time, not to mention ours. If this film has something to say to us now — and I emphatically think it does — it’s about the costs and opportunities that come with “dropping out” of mainstream society, in the name of political-cultural-aesthetic rebellion. It asks a question that has no answer, one that every disgruntled young dreamer — every potential Shirley Clarke, of every generation — must face on her own.

“The Connection” is now playing at the IFC Center in New York, with other cities and DVD release to follow.

If “Whores’ Glory” successfully resists romanticizing the lives of women who sell their bodies to make a living, Glawogger also does not surrender to what you might call the vulgar Marxist alternative, in which such women are interchangeable victims in a vast, mechanistic sexual economy, stripped of any agency or personality. Indeed, if there’s an ideological point (and a smidgen of hopefulness) to be found in “Whores’ Glory,” it lies in the film’s insistence that the women Glawogger meets in Thailand, Bangladesh and Mexico remain defiantly individual, even in the face of a system of sexual and economic exploitation they cannot (or at least do not) resist. Indeed, “Whores’ Glory” has a surprising double focus on the women’s economic lives and on their spiritual and religious pursuits. If one is inevitably reminded of Marx’s famous remark that religion is the opiate of the masses, one might also remember that his preceding comments were not nearly so harsh: “Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation.”

Right after that scene with the girls from the Fish Tank strutting over the Bangkok street, Glawogger introduces an extraordinary epigraph from Emily Dickinson, one that convinced me right away that this movie was something unusual. “God is indeed a jealous God,” Dickinson wrote. “He cannot bear to see/ That we had rather not with Him/ But with each other play.” Indeed, we have already seen brief vignettes of women in the three countries talking startlingly about their relationship to the divine. In Reynosa, a battered Mexican border city across the Rio Grande from McAllen, Texas, the street hookers all seem to pray to La Santissima Muerte (the Most Holy Death), a demonic female entity who seems to coexist with God and Jesus in their version of Roman Catholicism. In the City of Joy, a filthy warren of stone buildings in Faridpur, Bangladesh, a young woman tells the camera that she resists clients who demand oral sex by telling them that Allah did not make her mouth for that purpose; it is the mouth she uses to recite the suras of the Quran.

It’s details like those that make “Whores’ Glory” both a wrenching journalistic exploration of real life and something close to great cinema. This film, which took four years to complete, is the third installment in Glawogger’s series of documentaries about work in the era of globalization, which began in 1998 with “Megacities” and continued with “Workingman’s Death” in 2005. (I’m coming late to his work but what I’ve seen so far is absolutely remarkable — and you can see it for yourself in a retrospective that just concluded in New York and will soon reach other cities.) While the fluid camerawork of Wolfgang Thaler is never ostentatious, this film has considerable artistic ambition, with a score by Pappik & Regener (members of the German band Element of Crime) and soundtrack songs by PJ Harvey, CocoRosie and other indie-type artists. I suppose some viewers will find those ingredients intrusive or distracting, but sometimes the music (and Monika Willi’s remarkable editing) serve to create a little dreamlike distance from what we’re seeing on-screen. Without that distance, “Whores’ Glory” might be too difficult to sit through, quite frankly.

Compared with the dire conditions found in Faridpur and Reynosa, the women who work at the Fish Tank have almost middle-class lives. They live in modest but clean apartments, often have outside boyfriends, come to work by taxi, and punch in on a digital clock like industrial workers all over the world. On the other hand, the universal commodification of sexuality in Bangkok and the relentless capitalism of contemporary Asia seem to permeate almost every aspect of their lives. Perhaps it’s surprising that many of them spend their leisure hours hanging out with “bar boys” — coiffed and styled young men who work as prostitutes for an older female clientele — but on the other hand, this is a world where no one believes in romantic love, and everything is for sale.

In Bangladesh, social and religious taboos mean that the prostitutes generally won’t perform oral or anal sex (both of which are routinely available in Thailand). But the women of the City of Joy are virtual prisoners, often sold to madams after their first menstrual period and expected to live out their lives there, first as sex workers, then as madams and finally as servants. On the dusty back streets of Reynosa, where groups of profane, hard-bitten women turn tricks out of tiny sidewalk-level apartments, it’s a drive-by Darwinian free market for every possible sexual act or display, along with drugs, liquor and almost anything else that can be bought or sold. Both these sections of the film are tough to watch, at times, but Glawogger’s interviews with the prostitutes (and sometimes with their clients) always reveal things you aren’t expecting.

In Thailand and Bangladesh, what happens between the women and their johns remains behind closed doors, but in Reynosa, Glawogger persuades a prostitute and her client to let him film their interaction from beginning to end, an utterly businesslike encounter that’s about as sexy as buying half a pound of roast beef at the deli counter. It’s a moment of physical nakedness, but not nearly as revealing as when we see the same woman a bit later, smoking crack with a friend who is avidly trying to seduce her and talking about how visions of the Holy Death have eased her fear of mortality. There’s no judgment in “Whores’ Glory” — certainly not of the working women it depicts, and not even especially of their bewildered clients, who seem to vacillate from misogynist hostility to wistful romanticism and back again. There is, however, tremendous compassion, and more than a few moments of piercing clarity, as when a Bangladeshi hooker who looks no older than 15 tells Glawogger that women are fundamentally sad creatures. “Who can explain why this is true?” she wonders. “Is there no other path?”

“Whores’ Glory” is now playing at the Cinema Village and Lincoln Plaza Cinema in New York, and the Northwest Film Forum in Seattle. It opens May 25 in San Francisco, June 15 in Boston, June 22 in Philadelphia and July 6 in Atlanta and Washington, with other cities and home-video release to follow.

This scene occurs most of the way through Dean Shull’s scattershot but entertaining documentary “California, 90420,” which is sort of, kind of, a movie about Oaksterdam, the institution of higher learning — ha! I kill myself! — in Oakland, Calif., that provides the nation’s first-ever cannabis-centered curriculum. (Yes, many of our campuses have provided such an education for decades, but none officially.) Although the film closely follows the failed 2010 campaign to legalize and regulate pot throughout the Golden State, it clearly gains currency from the recent federal raid on Oaksterdam, which has put the future of weed-ucation in jeopardy. (While California law allows local municipalities to license medical marijuana dispensaries, growing and selling the stuff remains a violation of federal law.)

I don’t know whether Shull intends to debunk the stereotypes surrounding marijuana use or reinforce them, but he does a little of both. While he focuses on a number of characters around Oaksterdam, he can’t stay away from 21-year-old Alix (or just “Ix”), a stick-skinny gamine who is profane and funny and clearly intelligent and massively baked almost 24/7. Ix’s problem may simply be that she’s a kid facing a difficult transit into adulthood (and aren’t they all?), but given that she’s a bright and talented young person who appears to have abandoned all conventional ambitions in favor of growing, selling and smoking weed — mostly the latter — she doesn’t make the world’s best poster child. “Everything you love in the world will either reject you or die,” she tells Shull’s camera early on. “But not marijuana.” Why didn’t they use that in the Proposition 19 ad campaign?

The problem with California’s nudge-wink medical marijuana system is the same as the problem with weed-attitudes (weeditudes!) in our culture generally, whether pro or con. You can find the same problem reflected in pop-culture depictions of marijuana use all the way back to the Beats and the bebop era, and right through high-school scare films, Cheech & Chong, George Carlin and Harold & Kumar. That problem is universal hypocrisy, not to mention the difficulty of having any form of conversation about pot without descending into caricature and bad jokes, often abetted by marijuana users themselves.

Whether “California, 90420″ means to capture all these contradictions or simply does so with stoner felicity, I cannot say. If you are personally familiar with the dank, the skunk, the Irie and the chronic, by the way, you probably don’t need the movie’s title translated. If you’re not, “420″ is longtime West Coast slang for pot smokers and pot culture, reputedly going back to San Rafael High School in the early 1970s. At any rate, we seem to have agreed as a society, for the moment, that we like marijuana being illegal but widely tolerated, disreputable but ubiquitous, associated with subcultures of music and art and surfing and blackness and other things that seem cool but dangerous.

Just to be clear, I grew up in Oakland and nearby Berkeley (so draw your own conclusions about my personal history), and I’m 100 percent in favor of legalizing pot. But California’s current medical marijuana law is a total farce, and you can’t blame people who genuinely think that drugs are evil for claiming that it amounts to soft-focus legalization. Because it does. Yes, cannabis is medically helpful, and in some cases necessary, for people with cancer or AIDS or glaucoma or certain psychiatric ailments. And of course they should be able to get it. But everybody in California knows that’s not how the system works in practice. You find a sympathetic doctor (and the right ones advertise widely), and you say, “Gee, doc, I’ve been feeling kinda depressed lately. Plus I’ve been having hella headaches. Kind of seems like a recurring situation, dude.” He or she signs something, you get your ID card, and you’re gold. Or Purple Urkel, or Diesel Granddaddy Mandala, as the case may be. (Blends of, y’know, medicine that are evidently for sale in downtown Oakland.) As Ix says when she first sees a legal cannabis dispensary, “This is what heaven would be like if God were real.”

I suppose there’s nothing so morally or ethically troubling about that, as a temporary hack to a vexing social dilemma, that of how to police a substance that does little harm and is widely available but retains a strong stigma in some quarters. Prop. 19, the failed ballot initiative spearheaded by Oaksterdam chancellor Dale Sky Jones and her husband, longtime pot activist Jeff Jones, tried to raise marijuana to the legal but heavily taxed and regulated status of alcohol and tobacco. That was, perhaps, entirely too rational and non-hypocritical an approach to the problem, and (as we see in the film) was resisted by both Northern California’s big pot growers and Southern California’s most conservative law enforcement officials. Perhaps the most telling moment in “California, 90240″ comes when Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca tells voters that if they want to “do a joint” in the privacy of their homes, he doesn’t care and doesn’t want to know about it. But we still can’t have legalization because, as Baca puts it, “You can’t pass a law that would be illegal.”

That confusion is actually right on point, and reminds us that the current, fudgey social covenant on marijuana allows it to be used as a covert instrument of social control. Baca’s version of “don’t ask, don’t tell” seems like a reasonable complement to the fuzzy status of medical marijuana, but we all know that he and people like him will enforce the existing laws when and how they choose to. If people get high at a backyard barbecue in my middle-class Brooklyn neighborhood, there is exactly zero possibility of the cops giving a crap. If young men who don’t look like me get high on the street in a different part of Brooklyn, they could easily get roughed up and spend two or three days in jail, just for the hell of it.

It might sound like pothead paranoia to suggest that President Obama told the Justice Department to go after California’s medical marijuana industry because it’s an election year and he’s willing to trade the freedoms of stoners in Venice Beach and Oakland for a (largely theoretical) handful of blue-collar voters in Ohio and Pennsylvania. But this is the Democratic Party we’re talking about, so almost no level of moral cowardice is inconceivable. Obama himself seems way too tightly wound to have been much of a toker (whatever he may say about his Columbia years), and has proven to have little concern for civil liberties of any sort, except as they are deemed to affect electoral votes.

Over the next generation or two, pot will probably become decriminalized, step by step, but for the time being we’ll make do with massive hypocrisy on all sides, as depicted half-accidentally in Shull’s film. Oaksterdam is in trouble, and Ix never got to teach her proposed class on “bluntology” and the importance of avoiding “canoeing” (you figure it out). On the other hand, she’s now a copywriter at NASA, and that joke finishes itself, I think.

“California, 90420″ plays this weekend for brief runs at numerous theaters across the country. Check website for complete listings.

A British-educated democratic activist who had been tortured in prison during the 30-year dictatorship of Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, Nasheed was the surprise winner of a 2008 election that followed a popular uprising against the regime. In addition to pursuing an ambitious agenda of liberalization and modernization within his entirely Islamic nation, Nasheed seized upon climate change as an international clarion call. And no wonder — the Maldives is an Indian Ocean archipelago of several hundred inhabited islands (and fewer than 350,000 people), with a median altitude of 1.5 meters above sea level. As Nasheed says in Jon Shenk’s extraordinarily compelling documentary film, “The Island President,” it is a nation without a single hill. Nasheed has traveled the world describing the Maldives as the Poland of global warming — meaning, of course, Poland in 1939. If his country cannot be saved from rising sea levels, he maintains, then there may be no saving Tokyo or Mumbai or New Orleans or New York.

Shenk got extraordinary access to the inner workings of Nasheed’s administration, attending cabinet meetings in Malé, the Maldivian capital, and traveling with Nasheed to address the British Parliament and the United Nations. We watch Nasheed and his advisors hatching the plan to make the Maldives the world’s first carbon-neutral nation — not because it will make any practical difference, but because it will stand as a moral example that might shame the big emitters into doing something. (“At least we will die knowing we did the right thing,” he says.) Most fascinating of all, we observe the backroom deal that Nasheed helped broker in Copenhagen, where he served as a critical emissary between his Western allies (notably the British and Australian prime ministers) and the Chinese and Indian delegations, which viewed any climate deal as an unfair limitation on their right to self-development.

“The Island President” had been playing at film festivals for more than a year, to widespread acclaim, when an unexpected political twist lent it a new urgency. In early February, Nasheed was forced to resign the presidency in what he says was a coup d’état staged by Gayoom and his supporters, including radical Islamists who opposed his reforms. As Nasheed wrote in a New York Times Op-Ed a day after his resignation, “Let the Maldives be a lesson for aspiring democrats everywhere: the dictator can be removed in a day, but it can take years to stamp out the lingering remnants of his dictatorship.”

I recently met with Nasheed and filmmaker Jon Shenk, at a private club in downtown Manhattan to discuss “The Island President,” climate change policy and the situation in the Maldives. If the public genuinely supported him, I asked the former president, couldn’t he have resisted the coup. “Yes, I could have remained in power,” he said. “We could have murdered the coup. I could have asked people to go out and start shooting at the police, and finish it. But that would be a very shortsighted way of looking at things.” One can perhaps accuse Nasheed of being too idealistic, or overly optimistic — I’m afraid he undervalues the power of know-nothingism, arrogance and stupidity in American politics, for example. But you can’t say he isn’t taking the long view. (He says that if and when new elections are held in the Maldives, he will definitely run again.)

Mr. President, early in the film there’s a scene where you observe that after you had taken power in 2008 you thought the fight was over, and then you realized it was only beginning. That’s even more prophetic now than it was then.

Mohamed Nasheed: Yes, it is. You know, the dictatorship is back again. We were complacent to think that it would be easy to get rid of a dictatorship. Of course it was not easy to win that election and bring Gayoom down in the first place. But now he is back again, and the fight has to continue. It is very important that democracy be restored in the Maldives, and we hope that friendly governments understand the necessity and the need for it. As we see it now, I’m afraid the government there is going to all sorts of places. Certainly it’s not going democratically, and we need to bring it back.

For people who might not have followed the confusing news reports out of your country, please update us on what’s been going on.

There was a coup, and they overthrew the elected government. The previous dictator, Gayoom, is back, and all his children are back in ministerial posts. All his associates are back in government. Also, what is worse — not only Gayoom is back, but this coup was instigated through Islamic radicalism as well. There is a section of that in the Maldives, and I’m afraid we now have three Islamic radicals in the cabinet. We beat them in three elections, and they were not able to get any position in government. Now, through the coup, they are back, and Gayoom is back. So there is no respect for what the people have said.

And how has the general public reacted to this?

Everyone is out on the streets. There are huge demonstrations going on. People don’t seem to be getting tired. They’re not relenting, and they want to go on and on and on. We hope for a peaceful solution, of course, to what is happening now. We wouldn’t want the country to deteriorate into violence. If we can act quickly, if we can do it now, we will be avoiding a whole bunch of difficulties in the future.

President Obama spent part of his childhood in the Indian Ocean region and has a long-standing personal and political interest in that part of the world. Has he or his administration reached out to you since the coup?

I’m afraid that the United States government was very quick to recognize the status quo. This is very, very sad. I was shocked to see that. I hoped that they would understand, and realign their policies. Now I’m trying to speak to the people of the United States, because of that. We respect the United States and its people so much. We’ve been trying to liberalize the country. We’ve been trying to make it into a more moderate country, and it is sad that our policies were not seen and not backed by the United States. They’re still talking about how they need time; they’re still talking to Gayoom. There’s a game we used to play when we were little: Finders Keepers. It doesn’t matter how you find it, you know! But that’s not how one would support a democracy. I would hope that President Obama would understand what is happening in the Maldives, and I would hope he would lay his weight on the bureaucrats and bring a better political solution to what is happening in our country.

I assume that the new government, the one headed by your former vice president, is not going to address the climate-change issue in the same way you did.

They can’t. You must have a high moral authority to address climate change. Every time you start speaking, you know, you can’t be answering back to the skeletons in your own closet. So it’s not going to be possible for them to articulate in the same manner as a democratic government. I don’t see it happening.

At numerous points in the film, you express personal misgivings about dealing with the compromises and the rhetoric of politics. It makes the film very dramatic, because you seem like such a plainspoken and pragmatic person in a realm of spin and empty words. How frustrating was it, actually being a head of state?

Well, you know, soon you realize this is how governments work. We were elected to show our differences, not to go along with the status quo or to go along with tradition. We were elected to change things, so we did change things. We brought in legislation for a proper tax system. We brought in legislation for social protection programs, including medical care for all. We wanted to liberalize the country, in tune with its older Islamic traditions. We wanted to bring out the women, to empower them. These were all things that we were facing, major challenges. We wanted to reform the judiciary, the military, the police. We could not address all these things, and yes, at times it was frustrating. But we were, I think, delivering on our pledges and that was why Gayoom came back. He knew he could do nothing in elections, so he had to topple me.

Jon, let’s bring you into the conversation. As an outsider who clearly spent a lot of time in the Maldives, did you see the writing on the wall, as far as what happened to Nasheed’s presidency?

Jon Shenk: Anybody visiting the capital or talking to people in government could see from the get-go that the shadow of 30 years of dictatorship loomed heavily over the country. You’re talking about 30 years of autocratic rule, where contracts were given to favored relatives and friends, monopolies were allowed and all that. We would go to cafés in the capital and sit with our Maldivian counterparts to talk about the logistics of filmmaking, and their answers would be given to us in whispers. We’d ask, “Why are you whispering?” and they would say, “Well, you never know who’s in the room. Gayoom’s people could be in the room.” That’s the kind of fear they had. I’d say, “But they’re not in power anymore,” and the answer was, “Oh, but they are. They’re still in the police, they run the opposition parties, they’re trying to undermine us at every stage. And if they do get the presidency back, we’ll be put in prison.”

So that kind of fear really did exist. When the coup happened, it was shocking, and I was worried about Nasheed and others who I’d been working with. But it wasn’t surprising. They really were trying to do an impossible thing in the Maldives, by creating this vision of a modern, liberal, democratic state on the shoulders of years and years of despotism. And by the way, think about what’s going on in Egypt and Tunisia and Libya today. That’s what they’re trying to do, and in some ways what we’re seeing here — two steps forward, one step back — could be a harbinger of what is to come in those countries.

Mr. President, you’ve mentioned the role that Islamic radicals now play in the government. Can you talk about the role that Islam has played historically in the Maldives?

M.N.: Whatever happens in the Middle East also happens in the Maldives, and whatever happens in the Maldives also happens in the Middle East. During the ’70s, Wahhabism and radical Islam, as soon as it started elsewhere, filtered into the Maldives. And then we saw Gayoom coming. He was educated at al-Azhar University [in Egypt], where he was a classmate of Hosni Mubarak. Gayoom came in the late ’70s, and that also fueled the Islamic rhetoric. When he discovered he could no longer control the radicals, he started arresting them and beating them up. That created an underground network of Islamic radicals, and for a long time they were the only organized group in town. The only organized dissent came from them, because [the democratic opposition] were all in jail.

So young people started joining the radical Islamic groups, and by the time we were able to articulate a movement, they were already entrenched. But we were able to beat them in elections, over and over again. We beat them in the presidential election and we beat them in the parliamentary elections. Out of 1,081 local council seats, they won 4, and only because we did not want to contest them there. I felt that they had to be in the game somewhere. My assumption and my feeling is, you know, if we were able to do the things we were working on, without the coup, we would have been able to liberalize the country and address Islamic radicalism through democratic means, without infringing on their human rights and so on. But unfortunately we were not allowed to do that.

So what is the ideology driving Gayoom and his supporters? Or is there any?

No, there’s no ideology behind it. I mean, the ideology is xenophobia and racism. All the rhetoric against Israel and the West, calling everyone a heathen. It’s really narrow-minded and intolerant and nationalistic. This is an island mentality as well, but it’s possible to change that. It’s not the people who have that mentality but the ruling elite, who want to suppress the people through that narrative, that rhetoric.

Jon, this movie has now gotten a lot of publicity that perhaps you did not expect. Is there a danger that the issue you set out to highlight — the importance of climate change, and of President Nasheed’s engagement with the issue — is now being overshadowed by the political context?

J.S.: When you asked earlier whether the new government would carry on the climate battle, the thing is that Waheed, the new president and former vice president, might pay lip service to that. But it totally ignores the important thing that has happened in the Maldives, where Nasheed and his people have been working for 20 years, in a grass-roots, Gandhian struggle for civil rights and good governance and freedom of speech, all that stuff that has happened in so many of the great democracies of the world. The fight against climate change is an extension of that, in President Nasheed’s mind. It’s a fight for human rights. It’s a fight for the right to exist in a healthy environment and to have the freedom that goes along with that. So they’re one and the same. The fact that the film might get a little more publicity because of this political struggle really is one and the same with the struggle on climate change. It sounds naïve, maybe, but you’re struggling for truth and justice. The climate debate is about that, and so is the fight for democracy. Thematically they are the same, and that’s why Nasheed took on the climate fight when he stepped into office. It was an extension of his life’s work.

M.N.: During the ’70s, democracy movements had human rights as a foundation to build on. I feel that now climate issues and human rights are equally important. You have to save the planet as much as save the people, and democracy can be built on that foundation. I would hope that Egyptians, or all the other democracy movements in the Middle East, would find climate change as a track that they have to address. They cannot come into government without understanding climate issues, and what is happening to the environment around them. If you get beaten up as a human being, that’s very bad. When the world gets battered, no one is physically crying, but the planet is. All democracy leaders, all people who want to fight for freedom and justice, must fight for climate as well. In that sense, Jon’s film is timely and necessary. It’s must viewing for anybody with any interest in democracy.

How long do we have to save the Maldives? If nothing is done, when will your country become uninhabitable?

I think the science here is very, very sorted out. We can’t be so silly as to question the science. We have a window of about seven years to start acting now, and if we can’t do that, then I think within the next 70 years or so we will have very serious issues, not just in the Maldives but everywhere. Issues about resources, about water, about migration. Climate migration — there will be a huge exodus of people from place to place. The Pentagon has come out and said that this is a huge national security threat. But elections are fought almost entirely on economic issues. Nobody talks about human rights.

Presumably we’re not going to hear either President Obama or Gov. Romney talking about this issue for the rest of the year. They may talk about gasoline prices, but not about the underlying issues.

No, but the thing is, we do everything that we do for our children. Why are you working? Why am I working? We would not have any policies for ourselves, but we should have policies for our children. I think democratic leaders have been so shortsighted in listening to their advisors: “Oh, no, no, there are huge oil companies who can do this and that. You can’t do this, Mr. President!” You can do it, and you have to do it. You might lose power, but you are saving your children. We can’t have our policies only go as far as their noses, and the next election.

I am sure a new age of politicians is coming, in the United States as well. I still believe that if President Obama would start articulating on climate issues, he would get more votes, not fewer. I am convinced of it. The people of this country — yes, you are worried about gasoline prices, that’s true. But you are also worried about what’s happening to the rest of the world, to your own planet. You can’t just assume people are so simple, and be so condescending toward them. If you listen to advisors, the only thing people care about, apparently, is what’s in their pocket. If that were true, I wouldn’t be in government. Our children understand all this better than we do. They are not going to vote for oil companies and the status quo. If political leaders think that they have a future by taking the safe side, I think they’re very wrong.

“The Island President” is now playing in New York and San Francisco. It opens April 6 in Los Angeles; April 18 in Waterville, Maine; April 20 in San Diego and Washington; and April 27 in Detroit and Minneapolis, with more cities to follow.