Jacob Cartwright
& Nick Jordan Between Two Rivers, 2012
HD video, 96 mins.
Between Two Rivers is a feature-length documentary about Cairo, Illinois, a historic town with a dark and troubled past, located at the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, in the heartland of America.
With lyrical and striking contrasts between the past and present, the film reveals a community struggling with severe economic, social and environmental pressures.
Researched and filmed over a four-year period, the film combines original cinematography and candid interviews with archive footage, unseen for over forty years, capturing the town at the height of explosive racial tensions in the late 1960s. In 1969 Cairo witnessed the last pitched battles of the American civil-rights movement, at a defining moment in the nation's history.
Cairo’s dramatic and violent past is set against the latest crisis to afflict the community: the record-breaking floods of spring 2011, when the rising rivers threatened to destroy the town. The film is the debut feature-length documentary by artists Jacob Cartwright and Nick Jordan.
