User reviews

Very good, if not quite great, this documentary about poor villagers being cruelly displaced by a massive dam project in India has some emotional and powerful moments.

There's no pretense of objectivity here – this is a film with a point of view, and it expresses it strongly.

The weak spots are a certain sense of repetition, and a back of the mind feeling that good and bad might be a bit more complex than shown here – we're asked to take some of the film's assertions on face value, without question or rebuttal.

None-the-less, a moving and sadly inspiring film.

What is fascinates me about this film is how the Indian engineers fail to determine how much damage was cause when the dam was build. They use a computer software programs to give different situations regarding water flow, speed of the water, etc. and yet they still underestimate how much damage was cause by the dam in terms of people being displaced, how much land was going to be underwater, how many people lost their livelihood after the dam was built, the river traveling in a different direction after the dam was finished, and whether the dam ever achieve its objective of bring water to the dry lands that it was suppose to have done. For people who have math and science degrees, it shows how pretty stupid they were despite the fact that some of them were probably the cream of the crop of India's engineering corp.