American Water is a short documentary which focuses on two characters, Glenda and ‘Redbeard’, who live and work alongside the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, in southern Illinois. Glenda runs her father’s business, ‘Fred’s Fish Market’, from a small wooden shack next to the levees protecting the town of Cairo. ‘Redbeard’ ekes out a living in the backwoods of Thebes, on the banks of the Mississippi. Both Glenda and Redbeard talk with disarming candour and shrewd folk-wisdom about the traditional culture, declining economy and fragile ecology of this ‘heartland’ region bordering the American South. Demonstrating how to gut a catfish and spit-train a dog, American Water is a portrait of two spirited individuals existing on the margins of society, where two mighty rivers meet, in a forgotten corner of the United States.