The Producers

Corinne van Egeraat & Petr Lom are an internationally recognized filmmaking couple whose award-winning work has premiered at Berlin, Venice, IDFA and Sundance and has screened at over 450 festivals around the world and broadcast in more than 30 countries.

They are driven by the need for creative storytelling in the service of movies that matter. Specializing in urgent stories that reflect their values of dedication to justice, they work from a deep place of humility and generosity seeing storytelling as form of love and friendship, an act of giving and sharing. Their goal is ego-less filmmaking, that itself is a political act: collaboration without competition, made in the faith that cinema has a transformative power to enlarge our hearts and inspire us to embody our better selves.

They are both members of the Academy of Motion Picture Art & Sciences. And are New Zealand Edward Hillary Fellows, an international fellowship dedicated to global impact.

Making The Film

Corinne van Egeraat and Petr Lom read about the granting of personhood rights to the Whanganui River when it was world news in 2017. The story captured their attention and they travelled to New Zealand, where they had the good fortune to meet river guardian and Māori community leader Ned Tapa. They made a short film together with him about the river, and the result was one of the most watched short documentaries broadcasts in the Netherlands, on NPO2Doc-Kort. The idea of personhood rights for nature clearly resonated with a big audience.

They had struck up a friendship with Ned Tapa, and he suggested they return to make a longer film together. He had also recently met a visiting young Australian artist who worked with First Nations’ Australians, and she wondered if Ned would like to invite a group of First Nations Australians advocating for the rights of their rivers in Australia to travel down the Whanganui River together. This is how the idea for the long film was born.

The film is structured as a road trip: a five-day canoe journey down the Whanganui in two six-person canoes. The river itself is the main character of the film. For the Māori, the Whanganui is a living being – their ancestor. This belief has been institutionalized by New Zealand law as of 2017. Granting the river legal personhood is a way of environmental protection for the river, and as a way of legally validating the Māori worldview.

This way of seeing the world – and above all the values that underpin it – might be a crucial way for us to address the challenges now facing us because of the climate crisis. The film is an invitation to experience these values: of thinking about our relationship to the world around us – to above all the natural world – as one of intergenerational care and guardianship rather than just ownership/use/extraction.

The film is also a call for unity and togetherness – the recognition that we are all – literally and metaphorically in the same boat. This sense is fostered by making everyone on the journey – including the film crew – have a voice and become a character in the film.

Traditional Māori music artist Puoro Jerome also appears in the film, composing the score of the film. His music, or Taonga Puoro, literally sound treasure, has healing as its original purpose. Along the film's journey, this healing takes the form of sharing stories of sorrow of the past – of colonial suffering by both the Māori and the First Nations Australians and recognizing what kind of steps for healing the present from the past still must take place. And what steps the Australians might take to help their own dying rivers that do not have the protections of the Whanganui.

The film balances both heaviness and light – structured as a joyful journey of friendship. The viewers are immersed in the overwhelming natural beauty of the Whanganui River and will feel as if they travel along on this canoe camping trip.

The film team is made up of indigenous and non-indigenous filmmakers, and the Whanganui River is an official coproducer of the film.