“Another work of great beauty that lets the audience experience nature’s resilience instead of resorting to didacticism.”

“The sunlights differ, but there is only one darkness.” – Ursula K. LeGuin, The Dispossessed

Our planet has plenty of time. Do you? Concrete Turned to Sand, the second feature-length documentary of Canadian duo Ryan Ermacora and Jessica Johnson, plays with the concept of time in relation to humanity’s lasting (but not everlasting) destructive ecological footprint; in that sense it is a continuation of their striking debut Anyox. In this follow-up they examine similar elements in the context of oyster farmers in British Columbia, and how their work is affected by the acidification of the waters which constitute their workplace, a result of global warming. It’s not the first time this has happened, a marine biologist explains, speaking of Earth going through a similar period many epochs past. It took the planet 100,000 years to recover. So our little rock in the universe has plenty of time indeed. But as Concrete Turned to Sand shows, the planet’s timeframe is in stark contrast with the short time it has taken us to break the rhythms of nature. Yet nature has time on its side, while we do not.

The film employs long, contemplative takes of oyster farmers harvesting around Cortes Island. It’s a portrait of human labor as well as of the world below the surface where the delicacies grow, juxtaposing the industrious rhythm of humans with nature’s slower pace. Several scenes dotted throughout the film aboard the small boats of the farming cooperative can feel repetitive, but also seem to be deliberately placed to emphasize a cycle. The film starts in the dark, as men wade through the low tide at dawn, the lights on their headgear dancing around like fireflies; it also ends in the dark, again emphasizing this cyclical rhythm that has existed since forever. Like the Ursula K. LeGuin quote that opens the film says, the darkness of night is always the same, even though the days differ.

The sobering counterweight to this idyllic, almost poetic snapshot of the bewildering beauty of nature comes in voiceover, from oyster farmers speaking about failed harvests in the last decade or so, to scientists studying the effects of environmental change on the water that should deliver those harvests. Rising levels of carbon dioxide in the water lead to acidification and rising temperatures, which disrupt the ecosystem and affect oyster growth. As oysters are so-called filter feeders, organisms that pump water through their bodies to feed on the algae and plankton it contains, any disturbance in oyster growth or population affects an entire ecosystem. While the decade-long scientific research spans too short a period to uncover a trend in the pH values of the waters of northwestern Canada, the stories the oyster farmers tell unmistakably indicate that the environment is changing, and not for the better.

As with Anyox, Concrete Turned to Sand gives us just enough information to understand the issues here, but is above all an immersive and sensory experience that is meant to show, not tell. The film takes an unhurried approach to portraying the time and work that goes into oyster farming, and juxtaposes the menial labor with the raw beauty of the natural environment. Shot by cinematographer Jeremy Cox (known for his work on Backrooms), combined with an engrossing sound design by Scott Gailey and Alex Lara, Concrete Turned to Sand becomes a film in which the senses are continuously tickled. Cox meticulously plays with light and shadows, and uses macro-photography to create images that at times remind us of the creation of the universe sequence in Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, perhaps a fitting comparison given the film’s preoccupation with Earth’s geological timescale. At times the imagery gets distorted, stretched, blurred, as if to give a visual metaphor to nature changing. It is experimental filmmaking, akin to some of the works of other experiential documentarians such as Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor. With Concrete Turned to Sand – a title that refers to both a cycle, given that concrete starts as sand, and the transformative nature of time – Ermacora and Johnson have again created a film about nature’s perseverance in the face of man-made ecological disasters. It requires patience, but for those willing to invest in it, Concrete Turned to Sand is another work of great beauty that lets the audience experience nature’s resilience instead of resorting to didacticism.