The River

Pare Lorentz's companion piece to The Plow That Broke the Plains follows the Mississippi from its headwaters to the Gulf, indicting a century of logging, cotton farming, and flood-plain development that turned the river against the people who lived along it — and ending with the TVA's dams as the New Deal's answer. It was Oscar-nominated and, famously, beat Triumph of the Will at the Venice Film Festival. Virgil Thomson again supplied the score. As a work of the U.S. federal government, the film is in the public domain.