In 2018, Colombia's second most powerful waterway was stopped because of a controversial infrastructure project: the Hidroituango dam. Once completed, this massive hydropower project is projected to provide for 20% of the country’s energy needs. Yet, the social and environmental impacts are perhaps equivalent in scale to the dam’s colossal size. Already the area's inhabitants have suffered forced displacement, massacres, and systematic persecution, along with a permanent alteration in their ways of living.
Riada is an ethnographic inquiry into the impacts of this infrastructure project. The film’s poetic construction brings to life the river and the communities who have waged a thirty year battle to preserve their way of life. The film takes viewers through the river waterways in the Hidroituango dam's influence area to meet peasants, gold panners, fishermen, and scientists. Finished on the verge of the dam's inauguration date, this 100-minute journey poetically connects the survivor's raw oral stories and the harrowing landscape in three acts: swirls, debris, and mutations.
SELECTED SCREENINGS & AWARDS
25th Bogota Int'l Documentary Showcase (MIDBO), Colombia 2024
19th Galician Ethnographic Film Showcase (MICE), Spain 2024
Latin American Anthropology Film Festival (ALA), Argentina 2024