Roads of Water

Roads of Water is a fluvial western shot in an equatorial region. With an epic spirit, director Augusto Contento’s film investigates a whole people’s social and psychological condition and how nature determines and mirrors it. To travel through his eyes on the Amazon river and its affluents, surrounded by the landscape’s mysterious and pagan monumentality, is like going back in time and beating the tracks of wild west, crossing lands without law and boarding boats that are like real convoys, still full of colons looking for a better life in a nonexistent place. The protagonists come and go like the rivers’ currents, thanks to an original editing format that ramificates the narration horizontally, reproducing the fluvial map of the Amazon bassin. The film is carried by the original soundtrack composed by American jazz musician Ken Vandermark, whose music adds a poignant note that still resonates in the spectator’s mind long after the final credits.