MATT STOECKER, TRAVIS RUMMEL, BEN KNIGHT

Matt Stoecker, Travis Rummel, Ben Knight

“A lot of people see a huge reservoir, and they think, That’s a beautiful, beneficial thing,” says filmmaker and conservationist Matt Stoecker. “But dams are like coal-fired power plants. They decimate a river’s ecosystem.”

Four years ago, Stoecker and Yvon Chouinard, founder of apparel company Patagonia, wanted to see rivers come to life on film as they returned to their free-flowing state. It was a particularly timely moment—two large dams in the heart of United States salmon habitat were set to be demolished. Stoecker reached out to Colorado-based filmmakers Ben Knight and Travis Rummel of Felt Soul Media to create a story about the U.S.’s long but evolving relationship with dams and the push to remove obsolete or decommissioned dams even as the country continues to use and build others.

The resulting 87-minute film, DamNation, has brought the topic of dam removal to a broad audience. It’s been racking up awards at festivals, including the prestigious Audience Choice Award at SXSW, and became available on Netflix in early November.

“Dams aren’t charismatic, so we pushed ourselves to find beautiful, character-driven stories,” says co-director Rummel.

From 95-year-old conservationist Katie Lee recalling her last trip down Glen Canyon before it was flooded to form Lake Powell to the artist and activist Mikal Jakubal recounting his iconic story of painting a crack down the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir’s dam in Yosemite, the film’s stories enliven and personalize a topic that could easily devolve into statistics and political talking heads. In the end, even director Ben Knight became a character, functioning as a guide for the viewer as the film navigates its way through the decades of history and dam locations across the U.S.

The project required about 80 days of filming and took three and a half years to complete. The crew was there to capture the demolition and removal of two dams in Washington State—the Elwha Dam on the Elwha River on the Olympic Peninsula and the Condit Dam on the White Salmon just north of the Columbia River Gorge. Rummel and Knight nearly got arrested trying to kayak a series of navigational locks used by barges and personal watercraft on the Snake River. A fish biologist by training, Stoecker captured haunting underwater imagery of salmon returning to spawning grounds. Most of all, they chronicled the rebirth of an ecosystem after the dam removal.

“When we started, Ben and I didn’t really think these places could be restored. We pretty much wrote off the Lower 48 as a place where salmon could thrive,” says Rummel. “Once we saw how quickly the fish responded, we went from skeptics to believers.”

Within a year of the Elwha Dam removal, fish that had been denied access to the upper stretches of the watershed began swimming past the remains of the dams.

“On our last bit of filming, Travis and I returned to the Elwha,” remembers Stoecker. “Out of the corner of my eye, I saw this 30-pound Chinook salmon launching itself up the rapid, five or six feet out of the water. Two years earlier, I had been right there, underwater, filming fish trapped by the dam. I sat there for two days watching fish jump past the old dam site. Every time a fish jumped, Travis and I would put our arms in the air and cheer.”