AustLit

River, River is a sound drama that combines realism, dream and metaphor and marries poetic text, sound and music - traditional Filipino chanting and Western opera. Estrella uses her long hair to trawl corpses from the river in Iraya, a militarised village in the Philippines. In a time of war the river has become a dumping ground for the victims of summary executions. Each time a body is thrown into the water, it changes flavour: from river sweetness into brine, into lemon grass. Estrella remembers a night lit by fireflies, a night she is to retrieve another body. But this time she might know the victim. It could be her Australian lover who has disappeared. -- From the ABC Radio National website