Film Screening: Lost Rivers

In nearly every industrial city around the world, rivers have been a defining feature of civic life. We built houses along their banks. Our roads hugged their curves. And their currents fed our mills and factories. But as cities grew, polluted rivers became conduits for disease and other urban ills, and—as we’ve explored in the case of Seoul’s Cheonggyecheon River—buried underground and merged with sewer networks. The new documentary Lost Rivers retraces the history of these urban waterways by plunging into archival maps and going underground with clandestine urban explorers. In a film The Atlantic Cities called “mysterious, highly dramatic, and entirely compelling,” writer and director Caroline Bâcle takes a revelatory look into the disappearance and recent resurfacing of historic rivers. Venturing into vast underground museums of urban development, the film follows intrepid groups of subterranean scouts through hidden river networks including London’s River Tyburn, the Rivière Saint-Pierre in Montreal, Toronto’s Garrison Creek, and the Bova-Celato River in Brescia, Italy. Chronicling recent initiatives to resurface and revitalize once-forgotten waterways, including the Cheonggyecheon River in Seoul and the Saw Mill River in Yonkers, Lost Rivers draws on insights from visionary urban thinkers, activists, and artists around the world to bring to life new urban ecologies. Producer Katarina Soukup of Montreal’s Catbird Films will join for a Q&A following the screening. This event is presented in conjunction with Van Alen's current exhibition, Deconstruction/Construction: The Cheonggyecheon River Project in Seoul. Learn more about the exhibition series at http://rivercity.vanalen.org View the trailer below:

Lost Rivers - OFFICIAL TRAILER from Catbird Productions on Vimeo.