Director’s Cut Radio: Two Filmmakers Who Spanned The Ganges By Boat

This week on Director’s Cut Radio, an adventure documentary which takes us on a boat ride through India. J.J. Kelley and Ben Gottfried are the makers of “Go Ganges!”

Terry Bell: You make absolutely no bones about the fact that you were not experts on the Ganges when you started out this project. So, what made you want to do a film about it?

J.J. Kelley: Well, it’s a fascinating body of water. The most populated, the most polluted – also treated as a goddess. So we just had the chance to go over there, and we wanted to see more.

TB: That’s a fascinating point to bring up. To Indians, this is a god, this river. Yet they treat it horribly in a lot of cases.

JK: It’s a tough, very complex issue. And contentious on many fronts, because there are so many people who live on that river. The entire population of the United States – that’s many people live on this river. So, if we all lived on one river, imagine how putrid it might be. But at the same time it is worshipped, it is treated as a god, and it’s just a different way of looking at a body of water. To them, some people believe it’s polluted, others, they just think that that’s the way a river should function.

Ben Gottfried: And as one of the Indians in the film describes, a big part of the issue is just poverty. They don’t have septic systems. They don’t have things that would avoid a lot of that pollution from getting in the river. So yes, they worship it, but they don’t have a lot of other options.

TB: The fact that you were not experts on the Ganges – was the point of that to bring the viewer on a journey of discovery with you?

JK: Absolutely, I think that really played into it. We went in as filmmakers and storytellers, and we wanted to find out how people use the Ganges, and really we wanted to have an adventure on it. This film has won some environmental awards, which has been amazing to see, but we never set out to make an environmental film. We set out, essentially, to have an adventure. The thesis was to travel from the source of the Ganges all the way through to the end, and see what we see.

TB: But you seem to have had an environmental impact on the river because of this film.

JK: It’s been fun to see that. The World Bank gave a billion dollars to clean up the river, and they actually contacted us recently, and are working with us to find ideas to clean the river, and to raise awareness about it.

See more of J.J. Kelley, Ben Gottfried, and “Go Ganges!” on Director’s Cut, Friday June 27 at 10 p.m. on Wisconsin Public Television.