Ben Masters' 'The American Southwest'-Ten out of Ten

 

“The American Southwest”: A Luminous Ode to Water, Land, and Spirit

There are films that ask us to look, and there are films that ask us to see. Ben Masters’s stirring new documentary, “The American Southwest,” narrated with grace and quiet power by Quannah Chasinghorse, belongs wholeheartedly to the latter. The film opens not with spectacle, but with a greeting — a simple, earnest request to listen, to learn, and, perhaps, to protect. That invitation becomes the moral current running beneath this sweeping, wondrously photographed journey down the Colorado River.

Chasinghorse’s voice, both tender and resolute, carries the story like water smoothing the edges of stone. “Water is the divine force in this unforgiving landscape,” she tells us — and indeed, the film treats that idea as gospel. From glinting tributaries at dawn to sandstone canyons painted in molten light, Masters captures the Southwest’s delicate balance between abundance and absence, as well as the tension between grace and greed. The result is not just a wildlife documentary but an ecological prayer — an eloquent plea for stewardship in a world too often governed by extraction and disregard.

Masters structures the story as a braid of two timelines: the literal voyage of the Colorado, coursing from alpine headwaters to delta, and the human history interlaced with its flow. We meet the river’s oldest guardians — beavers who build and rebuild, elk who bugle across the valley dusk, rattlesnakes jeweled in desert dust. Their presence feels mythic yet immediate, each life tethered to the water on which civilization itself depends. The film becomes a cartography of interconnection, drawing us into the intimate choreography of ecosystems often unseen by the modern eye.

Chasinghorse, an Oglala Lakota and Hän Gwich’in model and activist born on Navajo land, lends sacred weight to the narration. Through her, the film honors Indigenous knowledge not as a sidebar but as a foundation — a worldview rooted in reciprocity and reverence. Her voice bridges ancient memory and contemporary reckoning, revealing how the river’s story is also our own: a chronicle of choices, of care or carelessness, that ripple far beyond any one lifetime.

In a brisk yet lyrical 107 minutes, “The American Southwest” becomes an aching meditation on beauty and loss. Masters, whose earlier works explored wild mustangs and the American frontier, returns here to more personal ground. As he recounts in the film’s press notes, a youthful horseback journey through New Mexico and Colorado lit this lifelong devotion to the land. That spark now expands into full blaze — a visionary work that captures both awe and alarm in equal measure.

Premiering at Telluride Mountainfilm and embraced by wildlife festivals from Missoula to Washington, D.C., this Fin & Fur Films production cements Master’s reputation for marrying scientific acuity with cinematic wonder. The nomination for Best Ecosystem at Jackson Wild highlights the film’s unique fusion of artistry and advocacy. Yet its greatest achievement lies not in prestige but persuasion: it makes you feel the river’s pulse — and mourn the prospect of its silence.

“The American Southwest” deserves to be seen widely — in classrooms and congregations, in community halls and homes wherever climate concern beats a steady drum. Masters and Chasinghorse remind us that water, life’s simplest element, is also its most fragile truth. 

To watch this film is to be called — softly, insistently — to stand beside the river and choose what kind of ancestor we wish to be.

Ten out of Ten. Highly recommend