A pair of young documentary makers, Nicolas Boisclair and Alexis de Gheldere teamed up with two environmental activists, Fran Bristow and Steve Leckman, to undertake an adventurous canoe trip up the expansive and isolated Romaine River in Quebec.

The trip is meant to document the river while it still exists and highlight the impact of Hydro-Quebec’s Romaine River project on the Canadian landscape and wildlife as well as what this project will mean to those that live along the river.

A challenging journey, the crew will have to navigate over a dozen waterfalls and hundreds of rapids. The area is quite isolated with no inland roads. Communications would have to be conducted via satellite in the event of an emergency. Dehydrated rations for the trip, which is scheduled for 50 days, and batteries for their digital video camera will have to be carefully packed and carried for the entire trip.

On 4 July, 2008 Hydro-Quebec signed a partnership agreement with the Nutashkuan Nation worth an estimated 43 million dollars benefiting the Innu community of Nutashkuan over the next sixty years. The agreement also allows for the community’s participation in construction and environmental impact monitoring projects.

This renewable energy project, is expected to draw 1550 Megawatts of power and produce almost eight terawatt-hours, (eight billion kilowatt hours), of energy with four hydroelectric stations. The project will cost around 6.5 billion Canadian Dollars and the power stations are scheduled to be brought into service between 2014 and 2020.

While one impact study concludes that the river will virtually disappear and the landscape will transform into a series of lakes; according to Hydro-Quebec, the only major impact would be the disappearance of the Great Falls located at the 52.5 kilometer point of the river and the proposed site of the Romaine-1 power generation station.

Perhaps the trip by these intrepid explorers will shed some light on the impact that the project could actually have on the area surrounding the river. If nothing else, their efforts will preserve, on film, the Romaine River while it still exists in it's current state.

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