The River by Jennifer Peedom will screen at Dendy and Palace Electric Cinemas

The Canberra-born filmmaker, and writer and director of the critically-acclaimed Sherpa, is well-placed to take advantage of an audience demand for real-world stories.

A British Academy Film Awards-nominated Australian director, Ms Peedom is best known for films exploring the great outdoors.

The latest, "a retelling of the history of both rivers and human civilisation", has been released in time to meet that audience demand.

River spans six continents and draws on satellite filming to provide large-scale aerial views of some of the world's most famous waterways.

Featuring the Murray Darling and Colorado rivers, the film examines how short-sighted attempts to control nature have backfired.

Through a collaboration with the Australian Chamber Orchestra, breathtaking imagery is overlaid by a soundtrack journeying from Bach to Radiohead.

River was conceived as both a film for cinema and one that would tour with the Australian Chamber Orchestra and have its score played live.

Ms Peedom said the "musical and cinematic odyssey" was the kind of film audience members could sink into.

"We wanted to say something about what we see happening in the environment, but on a very large scale," she said.

"In a way that hopefully causes the audience to have an encounter with nature and to think about our relationships with the natural world."

Using National Aeronautics and Space Administration imagery to show a time lapse of human impact on waterways, the filmmakers have attempted to tell the story from a global perspective.

Ms Peedom said the film touches on the heartbreaking Murray Darling river fish kill, while examining the impact of water mismanagement and damming more broadly.

"I'd often thought of dams as a great source of clean power, which they are, but damming is really across the globe now completely out of control," she said.

"It has devastating consequences downstream to farming and all sorts of other environmental impacts that ultimately will harm our ability to farm our own food, which is a problem when we have a growing global population."

Now based in Sydney, Ms Peedom left Canberra after high school to live in Panama City and later lived in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Her film career was launched after being selected to take part in the ABC's Race Around the World, a reality show for budding documentary filmmakers.

Ms Peedom said finding her niche as an outdoor filmmaker wasn't deliberate, rather, it came from living with a couple of Kiwis with work contacts in the mountains.

"I would just say yes to all those opportunities that ended up being in the adventure space," she said.

"It's funny how you end up following a particular path and then more and more opportunities open up on that path."

Initially filming adventure races, Ms Peedom moved on to work as a mountain-climbing camera operator on Everest.

"My body just seemed to work very well at altitude, so I ended up getting offered more gigs," she said.

Off the back of one such gig was a Dateline story on Everest that aired in 2005 and an Everest Discovery Channel series in 2006.

"It just sort of became my niche, I guess," she said.

Sherpa, filmed during the 2014 Everest climbing season in which an ice avalanche killed 16 local workers, earned its makers a host of awards. Despite the success of Sherpa, Ms Peedom said she made a conscious decision after her children were born to knock back the "super dangerous kind of stuff".

"I have two kids, 11 and 13 now, and I'm running a production company and life gets pretty busy," she said.

"I have been back to Nepal with my kids, up into the Everest base-camp region where I have a lot of Sherpa friends, to see that part of the world which became such a special part of my life."

River will be the second feature documentary with the Australian Chamber Orchestra which the collaborators hope will be a trilogy.

It follows Mountain, a story about those who seek risks and challenges in mountains.

When thinking about what to focus on next, Ms Peedom said it was clear the world's rivers were much more vulnerable than its mountains.

"As artists, we try and reflect our feelings about the world," she said.

"I'm not an activist filmmaker. That's never been my thing. I think there's a lot of filmmakers that do that really well.

"I kind of take landscapes on a big epic scale, and obviously this collaboration we have with the Australian Chamber Orchestra lends itself to these big concept films.

Ms Peedom said telling the history and exploring what lessons had been learned was more urgent than the telling of Mountain.

"It does have something to say about our relationship to rivers and how we are failing them and in doing so sort of failing ourselves.

"We really take the audience right back to a time where we revered rivers as gods and with good reason in a way.

"They were the things that enabled us to stay alive and to thrive and eventually enabled us to settle and to dwell and to farm.

"It was about taking the audience back and reminding them of this, how this relationship has changed over time and how maybe we have pushed too far."

Despite covering considerably heavy content over the course of her career, Ms Peedom said she remains a hopeful person.

Hope remains for our rivers too, she said.

"There is an incredible amount of evidence that when we restore the natural balance of things, the health of rivers can restore themselves remarkably quickly," Ms Peedom said.

"So there is hope. But also, the current state of play is not a pretty picture.

"The vast majority of the world's rivers have been polluted and dammed and diverted and I think we need to take a fairly urgent look at that.

"But there is still hope and there is still time to redirect the course."

River will be screened at both Dendy and Palace Electric cinemas in Canberra from March 24. The live orchestra tour will come to Canberra in 2023, as well as Brisbane, Melbourne, Newcastle and Sydney. Dates for the tour are yet to be released.