(dog barks)
(birds chirping)
- [Crew] Ready for a check? - Cello one.
[Crew] I'l just call take numbers as we go.
[Willem Dafoe] Okay. [Performer 2] Violin one, two, two.
(laughing)
(indistinct chatter)
[Willem] I've got lots of images in my head.
So "of" is to be included?
(vocalises)
Okay.
- How're you doing on my juicy S's? - [Engineer] That's a fairly easy fix.
That's what I thought, I wanted to hear it to reassure me.
- [Crew] We're going to go for a take. - Okay.
(instrumental music playing)
(water crashes)
[Willem] Humans have long loved rivers.
But as we have learned to harness their power,
have we also forgotten to revere them?
(light instrumental music playing)
When the first rains fell,
the Earth awakened.
It rained without pause for thousands of years
sculpting new landscapes into being.
(light instrumental music playing)
Drops gathered as streams,
streams braided into rivers
growing in force as they flowed ever onwards and downwards.
(instrumental music playing)
For eons, running water obeyed only its own laws.
(instrumental music playing)
Patient and persistent, it wore mountains away.
(dramatic instrumental music playing)
It looped and meandered
laying down great plains of lush, rich silt.
(instrumental music playing)
Where rivers wandered, life could flourish.
(instrumental music playing)
For rivers are world-makers.
They have shaped the Earth,
and they have shaped us as a species.
(instrumental music playing)
For thousands of years we worshiped rivers,
as the arteries of the planet,
the givers of gifts,
the well-springs of wonder.
(instrumental music playing)
Rivers are the source of human dreams,
and they have flowed through our lives as surely
as they have flowed through places.
(ice creaking)
(instrumental music playing)
High among peaks flow vast rivers of ice.
(high-energy instrumental music playing)
Glaciers seem frozen into stasis,
yet they are always in flux.
(instrumental music playing)
Their ice has currents,
rapids,
eddies.
Crevasses creak open where they spill down valleys,
or carve round comers.
(instrumental music playing)
And through these glaciers,
wind streams of meltwater.
(instrumental music playing)
Freed by the sun from its slow-motion existence as ice,
running water starts to sing its way to the sea.
(instrumental music playing)
(instrumental music intensifies)
To be truly alive, a river must be wild,
wilful and unhindered.
Yearning for the ocean, its only purpose
is to descend.
(instrumental music playing)
(man chanting)
(water crashing)
(rain pouring)
(man singing}
For millions of years humans wandered the earth.
It was rivers that created fertile valleys;
made it possible for us to settle and to dwell.
(instrumental music playing)
The first cities arose on the banks of great waterways.
Our early destiny was shaped by the will of rivers.
We both feared and revered them as forces of life,
and of death.
We worshiped them as Gods.
(instrumental music playing)
Rivers inspired us as a species,
allowing us to thrive.
(instrumental music playing)
Over time, they became the highways by which trade,
and technology spread inland,
and along them also flowed poetry,
stories and religions,
politics and conflict.
Rivers grew our towns and cities
but they were also indifferent to human plans and dreams.
(instrumental music playing)
Fickle and unpredictable,
in flood they could wreak havoc,
and in drought
they could disappear completely.
And so, we devised extraordinary means of controlling them,
of hamessing their force and taming their wildness.
(bomb exploding)
(instrumental music playing)
We discovered how to regulate and manage them,
how to run them like machines.
We shifted from seeing rivers as living beings
to seeing them as resources.
Our gods had become our subjects.
(instrumental music playing)
(plane engine roaring)
Qur ability to control rivers
has changed the course of history.
Droughts and floods have been averted,
arid land made fertile.
Rivers have helped make war and bring peace.
They have shaped empires,
divided nations and nourished humanity.
(children chatter)
In many places the river is still revered,
still vital to life,
and to death.
(instrumental music playing)
(instrumental music intensifies)
(light instrumental music playing)
The worship of water is a given to millions of people.
The river's power remains a sacred power.
It heals, consoles, and purges.
It washes away sin and purifies the dead.
It is a source of hope, love, and longing.
It is the way of life.
(instrumental music playing)
To those who live and die by the river,
their river is the river.
Essential for emotional and spiritual sustenance.
Essential for survival.
(birds chirping)
(instrumental music playing)
(instrumental music intensifies)
We've learned to carry rivers
to places they would never naturally have flowed.
(instrumental music playing)
Rivers stil exert an immense influence upon us.
A global network of transport and connection
scarcely remembered in everyday life.
Today, the world's greatest cities
all have a river at their heart.
Rivers have enabled unimaginable prosperity for some.
For all their might though,
rivers are fragile:
easily harmed, not so easily mended.
(instrumental music playing)
Vast waterways have been drained,
and re-directed to meet our growing needs.
We've made deserts bloom
fostering delusions of infinite abundance.
(instrumental music playing)
We've stopped going to the river.
Now
we bring the river to us.
But there's always a downstream cost,
somebody somewhere must have less.
The amount of water in the hydrosphere
hasn't changed since the first rains fell,
but the number of people on earth has grown exponentially,
and every one of us is utterly dependent on water.
The sheer scale of the human project
has begun to overwhelm the world's rivers.
Today, there is scarcely a river unspanned,
undammed, or undiverted.
(instrumental music playing)
The grandest dams have impounded so much water,
that they've slowed the rotation of the earth.
(instrumental music playing)
(man singing}
Dams make miracles possible.
They conjure clean power
from little more than water and gravity.
They slake the thirst of millions.
They hold back floods
but at such cost.
Trapped and static, a dammed river stagnates.
Its sediment settles to the reservoir floor.
Dams achieve what should be impossible:
they drown rivers.
(instrumental music playing)
(boat engine roaring)
(high-energy instrumental music playing)
Once discharged, stripped of its sediment,
dammed water brings more damage than life.
Floodplains and deltas are no longer nourished by silt.
The cycle of replenishment we depend on is broken.
The power-grids not the seasons
determine the rivers' flow.
And the energy that dams generate often fails to reach those
who need it most.
(drum beats)
(instrumental music playing)
We have riddled our rivers with poisons in the name of progress.
Each year blooms of toxic algae blight more rivers and lakes,
leaving their water unswimmable, undrinkable
even fatal.
Instead of life-giving sediment and nutrients,
rivers now carry millions of tons of plastic waste
to the sea each year.
As ever, the poorest suffer most.
One country's affluence is another's affliction.
(instrumental music playing)
Many rivers now fight for survival.
They gasp for water, gather behind dams
are channelled through cities stripped of life.
The mystery and beauty of a wild river
is beyond our ability to comprehend
but within our capacity to destroy.
(instrumental music playing)
Rivers that have flowed for eons
have been cut off in decades.
(instrumental music playing)
Time and again,
upstream need and upstream greed
have led to downstream disaster.
(instrumental music playing)
We have become Titans,
capable of shaping our world
in ways that will endure for millions of years to come.
For time flows too,
and we stand upstream of a precarious future.
The lives of our rivers now
will determine the destinies of generations to come.
We will be remembered for all that we have depleted,
vanished and killed.
(sorrowful instrumental music playing}
We must ask ourselves,
"Are we being good ancestors?"
Rivers live in deep time,
tumbling through millennia.
They give us so much more than water.
They course through our imaginations,
renew our spirits.
With quiet determination,
they overcome the hardest and strongest things.
(inspirational instrumental music playing)
They run into the future,
and they remember the past,
painting their way across landscapes.
(inspirational instrumental music playing)
(birds chirping)
At last, the river vanishes into the sea.
Its spirit is never lost forever though,
its death in the ocean begins its reincamation.
Water cannot be created or destroyed,
it merely changes state,
in an endless cycle of renewal
driven by the great engine of the Sun.
For the atmosphere is alive with moving water too,
the sky has rivers.
(instrumental music playing)
Vast Amazons and Niles of vapour flow from sea
back to source.
(high-energy instrumental music playing)
Together these sky-rivers hold more water
than all the streams and rivers on Earth combined.
(instrumental music playing)
(instrumental music intensifies)
(thunder rumbling)
(rain pouring)
Many cultures have never forgotten
what it means to think like a river,
or how to listen to rivers.
They know that the fate of rivers,
and the fate of humans are inextricable.
It's easy to forget that there are places
and forces which don't respond fo the flick of a switch,
or the twist of a dial.
Which have their own rhythms and orders of existence.
Wild rivers correct this amnesia.
Rivers are vulnerable to our harm,
but they also possess miraculous powers of recovery.
Given a chance their life pours back.
(thud)
(instrumental music playing)
After years imprisoned behind concrete,
their sediment is freed 10 carry on downriver,
and nourish the land again.
(man singing}
(instrumental music playing)
(man singing}
(music builds in intensity)
(man singing}
(instrumental music playing)
To think like a river
means to dream downstream in time,
to imagine what will flow far into the future
from our actions in the present,
to be good ancestors to those who will come after us,
downstream of us.
Look after the river,
and the river will look after you.
(man chanting)
We share our fate with rivers,
we flow together.
(man singing}
(birds chirping)
(end credits music playing}