Judging from her last nature odyssey back in 2017, there ain’t no Mountain high enough for director Jennifer Peedom.
She hasn’t made a movie about valleys yet, but apparently there also ain’t no River wide enough to keep Peedom from bringing it to our cinema screens with great scale and poeticism.
River, a stirring feature-length documentary on the integral relationship between humans and these ancient bodies of water, is now playing in Australian cinemas. It’s 75 minutes of astounding sound and visuals that’s certain to make you feel thankful to live on this big, blue, ever-flowing dot.
Willem Dafoe will lend his leathery, recognisable voice to River, explaining the intricacies and beauty of each location via narration. Your soundtrack comes courtesy of both the Australian Chamber Orchestra and Radiohead, their atmospheric sounds and Thom Yorke’s delicate vocals building up to an almighty climax in the trailer below.
Dafoe warns that due to “the sheer scale of the human experiment”, we’re beginning to take our planet’s tremendous waterways for granted. “Our gods have become our subjects”, he intones, between footage of dams bursting and waterside communities bathing in holy waters.
River is certainly a film you’ll want to catch in cinemas, the only arena for such a sweeping and landscape-based project.
Critics are already gushing about it, too, with Peter Bradshaw considering River “an impressive visual event for the big screen” and Mia Steiber expressing excitement for the film’s out-of-this-world footage: “with incredible cinematography, including images taken from satellites, we see these expansive bodies of water like never before”.
