Award-winning Chinese Canadian filmmaker Yung Chang examines China's rapidly changing economy as seen through the experience of locals living through the construction of the Three Gorges Dam, the world’s largest hydropower facility in the world. For the government, the dam stands as a symbol of progress; but for at least a few of the 1.3 million displaced residents, the project has different meaning. Following local teenagers Chen Bo Yu and Yu Shi, who work on one of the Western cruise lines that sails up the Yangtze near the dam, the film presents dramatic changes to the landscape and the lives of citizens struggling with the realities of China’s new consumer capitalism.  Preceded by excerpts from Pare Lorentz’s 1938 poetic paean to the mighty Mississippi River and the WPA era Tennessee Valley Authority dam project.

While most assume that an “urban landscape” refers to a city, the word urban can also describe the process of socio-ecological change in which a natural environment is transformed into a built environment. In the case of riparian landscapes transformed by hydroelectric dams, the urbanity of the landscape is intimately entangled with the city and its culture and economy even though it is often quite remote from the city center and human society.

Yung Chang’s remarkable film Up The Yangtzee (2008) focuses on impacts of the building of the world’s largest hydroelectric project, China’s Three Gorges Dam.  Featuring intimate portraits of two young individuals whose lives are differently transformed by the dramatic economic and cultural changes happening in China, the film brings a poignant awareness of the planned flooding that will force the family of one of the main characters to face losing their home and have to move.

The program begins with Pare Lorentz’s Depression-era WPA era film The River (1938). This 31 minute, poetic documentary focuses on the vital importance of Mississippi River for the United States—championing the Tennessee Valley Administration’s hydro-electric dam project and its benefits for reversing the environmental devastation wrought by exploitative farming and timber practices. The film presents the mythic measures taken to control the river, prevent flooding, and bring prosperity to previously impoverished farm communities. Lorentz’s film can be considered an early model for environmental documentary filmmaking with its lyrical, hypnotic voice-over and powerful symphonic score by composer Virgil Thompson, that emphasizes the primacy of untouched nature and the dangers of human mismanagement. But the film’s techno-positivist argument—that harnessing the mighty river’s bountiful energy is a civic duty that can right the wrongs of the past environmental misdeeds— will strike contemporary environmental viewers as curiously anachronistic. The River’s optimism about dams is a stark counterpoint to the portrayal of the dramatic costs suffered in Up the Yangtzee. With a critical eye on the cruelty of the Chinese government’s decision to forcibly displace the 1.3 million people who are living in the shadow of the massive infrastructure project, Chang’s film asks viewers to consider the enormous sacrifices made by so many, already disenfranchised Chinese people in the service of technological and economic progress. But for all their dramatic differences, both films allow us to marvel at the transformative ability to harness the energy of rivers.