Only a short nine kilometers long, but full of contrasts - that's the Miami River. It rises in the Everglades - the world-famous swamp area in the south of the USA. Here, in the narrow reed thicket, the Seminoles once hid and resisted their expulsion. A few kilometers away, the Miami River flows into the Atlantic Ocean in front of the glittering Miami skyline. Wrecked freighters tell of trade with the Third World, luxury yachts and cruise ships of the not always clean money of the construction boom. New spectacular skyscrapers are rising into the sky along the Miami River, and there is hardly any other American city where so much construction is going on. In the process, the traces of history are threatening to disappear. Rivers connect people. They are lifelines, economic drivers, traffic routes. Man has tamed them over the centuries, straightening, channelizing and regulating them. Probably in no country as extreme as in the USA, long the land of unlimited opportunity. Here we have the largest dams, the deepest locks, the longest canals and aqueducts. Rivers flow backwards or are directed by computers into an artificial riverbed. Rivers gave their names to world-famous cities, from Miami to Detroit or Los Angeles. But hardly anyone today knows the rivers that flow into them. And the American dream of man's victory over nature is revealing itself more and more as an illusion. In her five-part series, Oscar-nominated filmmaker Katja Esson tells unusual river stories of the Colorado River, the Miami River, the Los Angeles River, the Chicago River and the Detroit River. With surprising images and from surprising angles. On her journey, she meets a wide variety of people who, with charm and great openness, tell of how the river shapes their lives.