Condit Dam Removal
Co-producer Matt Stoecker positions a camera the day before removal began on the Condit Dam in Washington.

Felt Soul Media, the production company behind some of fly fishing's most well made and entertaining documentaries, hopes to have their latest film, DamNation, completed by early fall. Led by Telluride, Colorado duo Ben Knight and Travis Rummel, the team behind the film spent over a year and a half and 9,000 miles traveling from California to Maine documenting the issues that surround the over 80,000 dams currently in place in the United States.

The documentary is being created in partnership with producers Patagonia and Stoecker Ecological, who first proposed the movie to Felt Soul Media in late 2010. Despite initially being reluctant to take on the project, Knight noted that after exploring the issue, it was "transformative for [them] as filmmakers to understand how much our environment has been impacted by dams."

According to an email release sent out by the team, in investigating the issues surrounding dam removal "they realized that many of the dams that shaped this country also wiped out salmon, destroyed towns, altered rivers and, in many instances, long ago outlived their usefulness."

Knight and Rummel are perhaps best known for their 2008 documentary Red Gold which chronicled the issues surrounding the proposed Pebble Mine in the Bristol Bay region of Alaska. Felt Soul Media has also created other very popular fly fishing films such as the wildly entertaining Eastern Rises and Running Down the Man.

You can view the film's trailer here. For more information and updates on DamNation, visit the film's web site.

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