The Colorado River - A strangled Giant

Dramatic rocky canyons and whitewater rapids - that's the Colorado River, at 2,333 kilometers the largest and most important river in the southwest of North America. It supplies 30 million people in the western USA with water and energy. Ten huge dams have been built for this purpose - including the most famous, Hoover Dam. It dams the Colorado River to form a huge lake, Lake Mead. The Colorado River is exploited, diverted and dammed on its long journey until it is finally no more. It runs dry before reaching the Pacific Ocean in Mexico. For 50 years, the river delta has dried up. But correcting human encroachment is proving difficult. The Colorado will probably never again reach the once huge estuary delta at the sea. Rivers connect people. They are lifelines, economic drivers, traffic routes. Man has tamed them over the centuries, straightening, channelizing and regulating them. Probably in no country as extreme as in the USA, long the land of unlimited opportunity. Here we have the largest dams, the deepest locks, the longest canals and aqueducts. Rivers flow backwards or are directed by computers into an artificial riverbed. Rivers gave their names to world-famous cities, from Miami to Detroit or Los Angeles. But hardly anyone today knows the rivers that flow into them. And the American dream of man's victory over nature is revealing itself more and more as an illusion. In her five-part series, Oscar-nominated filmmaker Katja Esson tells unusual river stories of the Colorado River, the Miami River, the Los Angeles River, the Chicago River and the Detroit River. With surprising images and from surprising angles. On her journey, she meets a wide variety of people who, with charm and great openness, tell of how the river shapes their lives.