Los Angeles River - From Mountains to Cement Corset

With 18 million people, the Los Angeles metropolitan region is one of the largest in the world. All these many people need water - water that is not actually available in the California desert. Originally, the Los Angeles River supplied the city with water, but soon it was no longer sufficient. Therefore, for 200 years, a huge aqueduct has been transporting water from the Owens Valley to the thirsty city. A masterpiece of engineering: 5,000 workers laid the more than 370 kilometer long water pipeline system, processed thousands and thousands of tons of cement and blasted tunnels through mountains and rock faces. The Los Angeles River degenerated into a flood control and sewage canal and flows along its entire length in a concrete bed, from its origin in the suburbs of San Fernando Valley to its mouth in the Pacific Ocean. Environmentalists have been calling for years to rid the battered river of cement. Now, the city is finally ready to partially free the river from its concrete corset and restore its waters. 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.