Fabienne Wateau is a Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Paris Nanterre and Director of Research at the CNRS (Centro Nacional de Investigación Française). She dedicated her doctoral thesis to the municipality of Melgaço (Alto Minho, Portugal), and in particular to the ways of sharing irrigation water and conflicts between beneficiaries – from which her book Conflicts and water for irrigation was published. Essay on social organization in the Melgaço valley (Ed. Dom Quixote, 2000). She also made several film documentaries, including a series of three short films about instruments for measuring water, in collaboration with the National Museum of Ethnology in Lisbon. The first was filmed in the parish of Penso (2002 – La pierre de partage de l’eau, 10’); the second in the parish of Chaviães (2006 – La canne à mesurer l’eau, 28’); and a third, for comparative purposes, on the other side of the river Minho in Galicia, in Arbo (2004 – Les conques d’Arbo, 7’). She then moved on to other research and film documentaries: in Alentejo, the return of the Alqueva Dam and the displacement of the village of Luz (Querem faz um mar, ICS, 2016); and nowadays in Estarreja, Beira Litoral, about the contamination by the chemical complex of the waters and surrounding lands.