Directors: Jacob Cartwright & Nick Jordan
Starring: Robert Streit (narrator)
Producers: Jacob Cartwright & Nick Jordan
Country: UK/USA
Running Time: 95 min
Year: 2011
(4/5)Heading to festivals and hopefully distribution in 2012, Between Two Rivers is an independently produced documentary from first time feature documentary makers Jacob Cartwright & Nick Jordan. I was lucky enough to be sent an early screener of the film to help get it’s name out there.
The film charts the tumultuous history of the town of Cairo, Illinois, which is importantly based at the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. It’s a town that thrived in it’s early days for this reason but is now practically a ghost town, it’s once crowded high street now reduced to deserted and derelict shells of the shops that once took advantage of the vast amounts of trade running through on the rivers. On top of all this, the area stood on the precipice of total destruction as the record breaking floods of spring 2011 threatened to wipe out Cairo forever. Between Two Rivers uses the looming shadow of this and the controversial plan to solve the problem by diverting the water to local farmland as a framing device for an investigation into what exactly went wrong in the town. As the film-makers look into this they uncover a town poisoning itself largely through racism. Technically set in the north of America, but founded by rich southern whites, there was a deep seated bed of racism in Cairo for years and it became home to some of the most infamous scenes of violence and arson during the civil rights movement. As the film unfolds, we look at the causes and repercussions of this history of hatred in the town.
(4.5/5)
