Throughout Fire and Water is the story of Dr. Hussain Shahristani, once Saddam Hussein’s Chief Nuclear Scientist and now one of his foremost dissidents, and his remarkable family. While Dr. Shahristani served eleven years of a life sentence in an Iraqi Prison for refusing to build Saddam a nuclear bomb, his Canadian wife Bernice Holtom stood by his side and raised their children.

During the Gulf War he and his family escaped to freedom, and they now run an organization to monitor the ongoing human rights abuses in Iraq. Their reports and videos have kept the world informed about the atrocities of an ongoing secret war in the south of Iraq – one in which over 250,000 people have died or been displaced since 1991.