The Song of the Rivers

Originally Dutch, a world traveler at heart, documentary filmmaker Joris Ivens focused his attention on the newly forming Eastern Bloc countries after WWII and spent part of his life and work in Czechoslovakia and East Germany. He then made a film for the East German company DEFA documenting the 3rd Congress of the World Trade Union Federation in Vienna in 1953. For this collective work he enthused many foreign directors and their national crews, who filmed the preparations of local delegations of the labor movements around the six great rivers (the Volga, the Mississippi, the Ganges, the Nile, the Amazon, and the Yangtze) for this international event. Their cinematic accounts then metaphorically “coalesce” like the “streams” of Ivens’ documentary song, for which Dimitri Shostakovich composed the music and Bertolt Brecht wrote the words. The film was awarded the Fight for a Better World Award at the 8th Karlovy Vary Film Festival in 1954.