footnote

There is a documentary produced in the 1960s by Shell Film Unit. Called Mekong, the documentary showed a United Nations project to engineer the river for the purposes of redistributing food production across the whole of Southeast Asia. The film unit had been established by the Shell Oil Conglomerate, which leveraged the oil company's scientific research into the natural world. Scenes of the film followed various international teams who contributed to the initial studies of the Mekong, celebrating the unity of 60 nations, including Australia, Canada, Holland, Israel, Japan, and the U.S., through a common purpose.

The film ends with the geopolitical assembly of various nation states, which was moderated by the Mekong commission and the predecessor of the MRC summit I attended last year. The documentary draws to a close with a dramatic line, stating that it is “no small task, even with all the genius, all the vision of the nations, to grapple with that silent primeval force, and remake it in the human image.” The sensing, mapping, and systematization projects portrayed in the film not only established representations of the Mekong landscapes, but also underpinned how the river continues to be contested between upstream and downstream nation-states.