Fair warning: After watching GenX: The Saga of Forever Chemicals, you may never think about your water the same way again.
The 2026 documentary, which screens November 13 at the Haw River Ballroom, is the latest work directed by public health researcher and filmmaker Eli Yetter-Bowman. It revolves around the pollution of the Cape Fear River by Chemours, a chemical manufacturer with historical ties to DuPont. In 2017, a local news report revealed that Chemours had been dumping a carcinogenic compound, GenX, into the river since 1980.
GenX belongs to a family of polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, that are commonly known as “forever chemicals.” These compounds have no natural means of breaking down, effectively remaining in the environment, and the human body, forever. Long-term exposure to PFAS chemicals has been linked to numerous chronic diseases, including cancer.
News of Chemour’s decades-long pollution of the Cape Fear River was particularly alarming, given that it is the primary source of drinking water for more than a million North Carolina residents.
Yetter-Bowman grew up in Wilmington, one of the municipalities dependent on the Cape Fear River. The 2017 report shed new light on the chronic health issues that had been plaguing both them and their mother for years. The realization that the water may have made them sick launched Yetter-Bowman, a graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill, into an eight-year investigation into Chemour’s practices and the history behind the production of forever chemicals. That journey is captured in GenX, as is the ongoing struggle of communities across the United States to gain justice for the harm caused by these chemicals.
In September, nearly 10 years after that galvanizing report exposing the company, Chemours made a $590 million settlement with North Carolina and 11 nearby local entities. Nevertheless, the company has continued to discharge PFAS at illegal levels into the river.
Ahead of the Haw River Ballroom screening, the INDY sat down with Yetter-Bowman to hear more about the community impact of Chemours’ actions, the creative process behind the film, and their continuing advocacy against the production of forever chemicals. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
INDY: Where did your fight against these forever chemicals, both as a filmmaker and a public health researcher, begin?
Yetter-Bowman: Like most people in North Carolina, it began in 2017 when I read the article about the unbelievable contamination of the Cape Fear River that had spanned four decades. The article felt deeply personal to me because, at the time, I was enrolled as a premedical student. My mom has a pretty awful illness, an incurable autoimmune disease, so I was really interested in working in public health to have a better grasp on why diseases like hers occur in the first place, and what were the systemic roots of that type of illness. It was just really coincidental timing to discover that there had been this completely horrible environmental crime committed, and that it was only just now becoming public knowledge decades after the fact.
That personal aspect is something that really comes through in the film. How did you approach the incorporation of your experience with the larger story that you’re telling about the Cape Fear community?
Honestly, it’s been a really difficult decision, especially because it’s been a long journey for us, and it is a nearly universal problem. The scale of PFAS contamination is global, and the extent of harm is ubiquitous. It’s always been a challenge for our creative team to decide how [to tell] a story that really could go in so many directions and could include so many different voices, but also not have something that’s just overwhelming for an audience.
Over the years, I realized that the more that I was able to be vulnerable with people that I was talking to, whether that was researchers or other affected folks, throughout the film and the process of making it, it became clear that the vulnerability and sharing the personal struggles were how I was connecting with people, as well as really getting them to care.
The film features a lot of community members in Wilmington and in the Cape Fear area, and their experiences with exposure to PFAS chemicals. What has been the role of community mobilization in the struggle against Chemour’s pollution of the Cape Fear River?
In the case of the North Carolina story, community advocacy and people coming together, who would otherwise maybe not cross paths, have been the driving factor that has been the change. The reason that everything shifted in North Carolina back in 2017 was because a particular researcher decided to go above and beyond and get the journalists involved, and get the local community involved.
There’s a detail that didn’t quite make it into the final cut of the film. The article that really reshaped everything, that catalyzed all the movements, that started all of the millions of dollars in research, the lawsuits, came from a 2016 [research] paper that then became the 2017 news article. That study was a repeat of a study that was done 10 years earlier. The information actually had already been there, but it lacked the communication to reach the community. It lacked translation, and it lacked the ability for the community to rally behind it. It’s our collective power across different forms of showing up. One person being loud on social media can help. One person focusing their research interests can help.
Switching gears here, the use of the Paperhand Puppet Project to tell parts of this story was a surprisingly impactful aspect of the film. How did you decide to partner with them for this project?
It was really important to give the audience a bit of a break, almost like a reprieve. These are really heavy topics; these are real people who have experienced real harm, and it can be difficult [to watch]. There’s some complexity to the story. We wanted some way to bring in some levity, some imagination, especially when we were thinking of how we wanted to wrap this story up. We’ve been fans of Paperhand for a long time. I believe it was during a 2024 performance that I was sitting in the audience and just [thought] “Oh my god, wait a minute, is Paperhand the way that we do this?”
My partner, Sammy [Bauer, a producer of the film], and I reached out to Donovan and Jan and approached them with this idea. It turned into multiple coffee check-ins that ultimately became structuring, storyboarding, rehearsing, and then performing over three days this four-act structure. You really only see a small glimpse of it in this film. We’re actually planning to release the whole puppet story as a stand-alone sometime after the GenX film is released.
Now that the film is coming out, what does your work look like in continuing to advocate for the regulation of these chemicals?
Sammy and I, our goal with this film has always been how it can be uplifting, transformative, and really create something for local groups to organize around. That’s something that we’re already starting to do. We really think of the film as leading us to the invitation, as Sammy appropriately dubbed it. Understanding that most of us have been harmed without our consent, without our knowledge, by a few selfish companies. When people learn that, they want to know what they can do.
Our goal is that the campaign can be these events that look different for each area. There are lots of communities in North Carolina that have public utilities that need upgrades, but they’ve not started any part of this journey. In a lot of ways, what’s happened in Wilmington is a great road map for how other communities, other towns that are facing similar or the same issue, can respond.
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