ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the importance to think with rivers, multispecies cinema and theory, several river-based sound and film projects, and end with a thorough review of the Rio Doce disaster and the methods behind the author's interactive film project The River Runs Red. On November 5, 2015, an iron-ore tailings dam on the Rio Doce, “the sweet river” in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, collapsed and released 60 million cubic meters of chemical-laden sludge. A turn towards embodied cinema— where bodies are both humans/Aquans and more-than-human— arrived with advancements in camera technology in the form of small, waterproof, inexpensive and portable cameras, often custom-made. Multispecies cinema builds on these prior sensorial, embodied techniques, yet also asks if the senses are emplaced in a larger ecology interrelated with intersecting worlds of humans, Aquans&more-than-humans. Just north of small town of Bento Rodrigues, ground zero of the dam failure, sat several massive pools of water holding a concentrated amount of tailings.
