Video and installation, 2018-ongoing
Director: Rachel Stevens
Collaborators:
– Pawel Wojtasik (cinematography)
– Gebhard Sengmüller (photography, drone cinematography)
Place of the Big River is an experimental documentary about ecological and territorial entanglement at the St. Lawrence River — in Kanienʼkéha, the Mohawk language, the river is called Kaniatarowanénhne — where the water acts simultaneously as international border, bisector of Akwesasne Mohawk Territory, and restless landscape. Through experiential images and sounds, infrastructure histories, and testimony from Akwesasne Mohawk activists and Tribal Chiefs, an Alcoa Aluminum union leader, and a lifelong amateur naturalist, the work traces the legacies of industrial progress along this contested corridor. Superfund sites, the Moses-Saunders Power Dam, the St. Lawrence Seaway, invasive species, climate change, and data centers all appear as nodes in an ongoing story of interdependence — between land, water, and the human and non-human communities that share it.
Special thanks to:
Dana Leigh Thompson
Larry Thompson
Ron Stickney
Gary Stevens
Gebhard Sengmüller
Pawel Wojtasik
Ken Micallef
The Puffin Foundation
