Flow & Rive (ENG)

Part of what connects the authors of this work to the Rhine is their time living along it: for her studies in September 2015, Danielle moved to Bonn from Brazil, staying there for two years; Roberto left New York in 2016 and has been living in Mainz, studying philosophy ever since.
Even in this relatively short time, the Rhine has come to mean something deeply important for each of them. Underneath its relative historical and cultural meaning, the Rhine is a river. It opens itself in a variety of ways every day to people along its entire length, from the quotidian and banal to the profoundly transformative.

Despite being a matter of natural pride, embedded in the German and European cultural landscape, the Rhein reached its peak of pollution in the 1970s. Such disasters as the Sandoz or BASF incidents served as a sort of tipping point for the situation, precipitating wide scale policy change, the integration of regulations influenced by environmental concern, and the establishment of organizations such as the International Commission of the Protection of the Rhein. These events bore the Rhein its current status, making again possible a host of relations for the people who live along its shores. Underlying their relation to the river, however, another danger is beginning to make itself known, quickly becoming un-ignorable.

When Roberto first hiked along the Rhine in the Swiss Alps, much foliage was already tinder dry, the possibility of a forest fire alarmingly high. Later, he and his Jolle got stranded in Basel; it was the summer of 2018, when the Rhine's water level fell to shocking, setting record lows. These new concerns have been brought on by a variety of inter- as well as intranational factors, involving dimensions of its ecosystem from the mountain to the estuary, as well as the larger role it plays, interconnected with other rivers, other veins of water criss-crossing the European landscape. Each of these places, each of these rivers are affected by how the people who live along them interact; while this fortunately now means less pollution, it certainly still means how the people along rivers use their land and manage the water cycles to work with their surrounding terrain.

Meanwhile, our eyes turn to the recent tragic situation in North Rhine-Westphalia as its reconstruction continues to unfold; our prayers and aid go to those most devastated by the catastrophe. While we salvage through the wreckage, the question of how this happened is on many minds, hearts, and lips. The increasing frequency of meteorological phenomena is precipitating a slew of disasters across the world. These other forms of natural disaster (fires, hurricanes) are not only aggravated by climate change, they are also a direct consequence of unsustainable land use, wasteful and inefficient production, and poor urban planning, negligent of the landscapes in which they are embedded. These are not new oversights; they have been and continue to be ignored, long sunk in ignorance and oblivion.

This was the central concern motivating this film, the text by Heidegger, as well as that of numerous other theorists and researchers across disciplines, who have been trying to sound the alarm for decades. For some reason, it is too often only in the face of such catastrophes that change is brought on; people are all too often only gripped by the danger when it strikes too close to home.

How long will these sirens fall on deaf ears?

Will only further catastrophe bring us all to listen?

This film is a message for consideration, a wake up call to reclaim our role in these occurrences. If the coming devastation and danger can not be stopped, then we desperately need to reconsider the manner in which our systems can change to better manage such events in the future.

Observation: The file for preview is still to have subtitles corrected.