The BFI London Film Festival Will Host The International Premiere Of Concrete Turned To Sand

Shot in 35mm by Jessica Johnson and Ryan Ermacora, the documentary Concrete Turned To Sand will have its international premiere at the BFI London Film Festival.

The BFI London Film Festival will host the international premiere of Concrete Turned to Sand. This film is a radical refusal of the conventional documentary narrative from Vancouver-based filmmakers Jessica Johnson and Ryan Ermacora.

Amid accelerated climate change and lives increasingly hyper-mediated by technology, the film resists the impulse to explain. Instead, it chooses sensation over exposition. Moreover, it enthralls us into a world of shadow, texture, and elemental darkness. In this world, nature takes on an almost otherworldly presence through the cinematography of Jeremy Cox. His work on Backrooms was widely noted for its visual precision.

Composed as a sensory experience, the film is the second feature from Johnson and Ermacora. Their work explores the convergence of labor, landscape and the political and economic forces that shape them. In this film, oyster farming becomes a lens through which varying scales of time collide. Specifically, it shows the years it takes an oyster to mature, the accelerating pace of environmental change, and the earth’s geological time. By placing human labor and science within these vastly different temporalities, the film asks us to reconsider not only how we look at the state of the environment. Furthermore, it provokes us to think about how we understand our own brief presence – and effect – within it.

THE PREMISE

On the coast of British Columbia’s Discovery Islands, Concrete Turned to Sand enters a world of extraordinary natural richness. In this world, oysters take years to reach maturity as the waters around them rapidly warm and acidify. Here, an oyster’s slow growth meets the vast timescales of the earth and the accelerating pace of environmental change. The documentary itself counters the speed of contemporary media consumption. Instead, it invites us to linger in its cinematic world and experience film in a new way.

Working alongside oyster farmers and scientists, the film interweaves everyday labor with scientific research on the contemporary climate crisis. This approach reveals how human livelihoods are bound to a changing ecosystem. Through nocturnal, richly cinematic imagery and sound, it gives visual and auditory form to the complex and often invisible realities of climate change.

These transformations unfold slowly before us, at the edges of the political and economic forces shaping the ecosystems communities depend on.

THE DIRECTORS SPEAK ABOUT THE FILM

“Throughout our practice, we have made films that focus on environmental resilience in the face of degradation in contested landscapes. Our films have focused on labor in relation to landscape; the participants in our films are often those who work and live on the periphery of political and economic forces which affect their lives and the ecosystems they depend on. Working with a cooperative of oyster farmers, we developed a filmmaking method that reveals their experiences, along with the unique pace of this work, carried out in tandem with the patterns of tides and sunlight on the island.

“The film is an encounter between the beauty and strangeness of our world”

We worked with scientists to provide insight into ocean acidification and its impacts, while offering perspectives on the geological timescale of our ecological circumstances. This project explores methods of representing climate change by experimenting with optical and auditory techniques that play with the distanciation between the viewer and the ecological subject of the film. Concrete Turned to Sand creates an encounter between the beauty and strangeness of our world, engaging us to think beyond our atomization, and towards broader ecological understanding and context”. – directors Jessica Johnson and Ryan Ermacora

SCREENING DATES AND VENUES

Sunday, October 11

20:35- ICA, Screen 1

Tuesday, October 13

14:15 -BFI Southbank, Screen NFT2

Produced by Sag Pile Films, Concrete Turned to Sand will have its international premiere in the Documentary Competition on October 11, with an additional screening on October 13.

 

 

 

 

 

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