“You Can Hear the River from Here”

This article considers how a hydrocentric perspective is used as a cinematic tool to articulate the entangled histories of migration, conflict, and deindustrialisation along the so-called Balkan route, offering a counter-hegemonic interpretation of violence against migrants and deaths across the 21st century Balkans. It does so through an analysis of two documentaries, Goran Dević’s On the Water (Na vodi, 2018), and Chris Krikellis’s Souls of a River (Seelen eines Flusses, 2022), which portray two distinctive riverscapes, the confluence of the Sava and the Kupa in the Croatian town of Sisak and the transboundary section of the Evros River between Turkey and Greece. Using a comparative approach, the article examines the aesthetic strategies through which each film reveals the effects of converging violent temporalities within their respective yet shared semantic registers. By doing so, it demonstrates how a complex sense of displacement is inscribed in attitudes towards watery places, while at the same also framing rivers as weaponised environments and human-engineered sites of death.