MEKONG APOCALYPSE
A personal take on ecosystem collapse along the Mekong River
directed and edited by: Michael Buckley
ThunderHorse Media, Canada
UHD 4K, also 1080p digital, 16:9, colour, Dolby stereo
Length: 55 mins 35 seconds
Release date: March 22, 2023, World Water Day
contact email: himmies757 @ gmail.com
Trailer: vimeo.com/799383176
The Mekong River is the most productive in the world in terms of fish catch and flow of nutrient-rich sediment. It is the most important river in Asia. But all that is changing. This is a satirical take on ecosystem collapse along the mighty Mekong River, with the biggest threat being Chinese megadams in Yunnan, SW China. Take a wild ride on the Mekong from Source to Sea: 'Mekong Apocalypse' explores the devastating downstream impact of China's megadams in Cambodia's Lake Tonle Sap and Vietnam's Mekong Delta. The filmmaker shot this on the run, getting undercover footage of megadams and illegal sand-dredging. Drawing inspiration from water puppetry theatre in Vietnam, this film features characters like a talking glacier in Tibet, waltzing fish in Laos, and a talking sunflower in Vietnam to get complex concepts across. With this slapstick approach, the film does tend to meander—like the Mekong herself. With its sly nod to Coppola's 'Apocalypse Now,' this is a documentary with strong elements of a mockumentary. Background music carries a stark message—as a number of tracks have been specially commissioned for the film. This film is part four of a series of films delving into serious ecosystem problems concerning the Tibetan plateau.
“The tragic decline of one of the world’s great rivers has never been told this way before. Director Michael Buckley has pulled off an artistic coup — by mixing the performing arts of Vietnam’s legendary Water Puppets, cartoons, graphics, video, and poetic spoken-word music — to drive home the message that dams have vandalized and degraded the free-flowing river. Watch his ‘Mekong Apocalypse’ and see why the Mekong is dying!”
—Tom Fawthrop, author, Mekong expert, and filmmaker for a series of Mekong documentaries by Eureka Films
“The weirdest Mekong film yet! Michael Buckley’s eccentric contextualization of the threats facing the Mekong is an apocalyptic acid-trip.”
—Brian Eyler, who has serious reservations about this film. Eyler is author of ‘Last Days of the Mighty Mekong.’
Michael Buckley is a Canadian filmmaker and writer. He has traversed the Mekong region many times since the early 1990s in the course of researching, writing and updating an 800-page guidebook to Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, and an 800-page guidebook to China, and writing a 400-page guidebook to Tibet. He has thus seen first-hand the drastic changes happening in the Mekong region. Buckley is author of 15 books and photo-books covering the Asian and Himalayan regions. He is filmmaker for three short films about pressing environment issues in Tibet and beyond.
The Earth's rivers are dying—under siege from megadams, pollution, retreating glaciers, climate chaos and other factors. These factors are all caused by humans. If the major rivers die, so do we. And yet what are we doing about this? In March 2023, the UN Water Conference took place in New York—for the first time in almost half a century. The last UN Water Conference took place in 1977. The feature film 'Mekong Apocalypse' takes a close look at the Mekong River, among the most important freshwater sources in Asia. Death by dams: the river is being slowly choked to death by rampant Chinese damming. Through construction of 12 megadams on the Mekong in Yunnan, China has generated over 21 GW of hydropower, and banked a massive supply of water in dam reservoirs. China desperately needs both power and water, so these megadams have solved that problem. But in the process, China has created an even bigger problem: slowly strangling the Mekong as a free-flowing river for everything—and everyone—that depends on the river downstream. The Mekong River is such a disaster that hope is wearing thin: even if everything is done right from now on out, the river has suffered serious damage, equivalent to life-threatening injuries.