This article looks at the representation of dams and displacement in the Soviet film Farewell (director: Elem Klimov, 1983) and the Welsh film The Last Days of Dolwyn (director: Emlyn Williams, 1949). Farewell depicts the drowning of the Siberian village of Matyora to make way for a hydroelectric power plant that serves the modern Soviet state, while The Last Days of Dolwyn portrays the drowning of a north Walian village to supply water to an industrial area of England. While each film, inspired by historical events, is set in distinct cultures and times, there are pertinent similarities between the two which justify their comparative analysis, suggesting cross-cultural patterns in the representation of dam and reservoir construction and the displacement of rural peoples.

I argue that through its depiction of local wells and rivers, their sounds and centrality to the lives of an idealised Nonconformist gwerin (folk) culture, Williams’ film captures something of the historical significance of water to Welsh culture. The film contrasts this depiction with ‘modern water’ as an abstract, impersonal resource to be systematically extracted and transported for profit elsewhere. Similarly, I show how Klimov’s film depicts a mythical, enchanted, pre-modern Russian culture (symbolised in the ancient waters surrounding Matyora, its tight-knit religious community, the tree that cannot be destroyed), juxtaposed against the terraforming power of the modern Soviet state.

Both texts idealise folk culture, yet frame it as a past to which there is no return, except through the power of film, which here functions as a memorialisation of a lost way of life, and – crucially - as an intervention in public discussions about the cost of modernity. Both films achieve this through shared formal aspects including: the figuration of villagers in the working rural environment, the banality and uniformity of modernity’s infrastructure, the use of music to drive audience emotions, and similar patterns in characterisation, including the personification of resistance to the dam in the figure of the female village elder (Merri / Darya).