Although the film has had a cinematic release, and won the best documentary and soundtrack at the 2022 AACTA awards, as well as the 2022 ARIA Award for best original soundtrack album, the tour was postponed until now because of COVID.

What Tognetti and Peedom learned in making the co-pro was that rivers the world over are being talked about and argued about; they are often mismanaged, overly controlled frequently taken for granted.

“There are very few wild rivers left, and you become really aware of that when there are floods in places like Lismore, where you understand rivers need to be given the space to do what they do naturally … because ultimately that pattern of flooding and retreat nurtures the earth and enhances our ability to live off it,” Peedom said. “When you dam rivers, you are stripping back that natural cycle of nurturing the earth.”

“I had no idea the damage done by dams and how they suck nutrients out of the water.”

Tognetti confesses he went into the project knowing little about rivers.

“Although more people live in closer proximity to rivers than oceans, I didn’t know anything about rivers; I’m totally illiterate about them,” said Tognetti. “I didn’t even know the town of Marlo was the mouth of the Snowy River.”

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That changed when he and Peedom and their creative team went bush for inspiration for this work, which includes music from Ravel to Radiohead, alongside original compositions by Tognetti and didgeridoo virtuoso and vocalist William Barton. The narrative of the film is written by British nature writer Robert MacFarlane, and voiced by actor Willem Dafoe.

“We went and camped in the winter above the Snowy River, which is where I had my first visceral experience of a river with the notion of making this work,” said Tognetti.

River was filmed in 39 locations and features NASA time-lapse imagery and drone footage of sites such as China’s Three Gorges Dam, the world’s largest hydroelectricity project.

“The fact that blew my mind with the Three Gorges Dam when we shot it with time-lapse cameras from above … its reservoir is so large it even slowed down the rotation of the Earth. It put the earth physically off-balance.”

Every drop of water is finite, but with a growing population we need to think more about rivers, says Tognetti, not just as modes of transport, but revere how central they are to our lives, whether it is the Thames in London, the Seine in Paris, the Yarra in Melbourne, or Sydney’s Parramatta River.

“We wanted to give people an encounter with the natural world to give them pause for thought about the landscape in the human heart,” said Peedom.

River plays in Sydney, February 10 to 14.