Directors Johnson and Ermacora frame the film as a bold ecological statement, pushing audiences to reconsider humanity's brief footprint on a planet operating on geological time. Slag Pile Films is positioning it as a sensory revolution in documentary storytelling.
Word on the festival circuit? This doc is basically telling the entire genre to shove it. No talking heads, no data charts, no hand-holding exposition. The Backrooms DP turned oyster beds into something that looks like a sci-fi horror set, and purists are reportedly scrambling to categorize it.
Shot on 35mm. World premiere at Hot Docs in Toronto. International premiere locked for Oct. 11 at the BFI London Film Festival's Documentary Competition. The film's own notes call it 'a radical refusal of the conventional documentary narrative.' Sound design by Scott Gailey.
This isn't a documentary about oysters. It's a documentary that dares you to feel the weight of geological time while staring at a shellfish — and the Backrooms DP made it look terrifyingly beautiful.
Let me be absolutely clear: I did not sign up for oyster farming to give me existential dread, but here we are. Jeremy Cox, the cinematographer who made the internet collectively lose its mind over the liminal horror of Backrooms, is back behind the camera — this time pointing it at oyster farms on the coast of British Columbia's Discovery Islands. And somehow, through his lens, glistening shellfish look like they belong on an alien planet.
The film, titled Concrete Turned to Sand, is directed by Vancouver-based duo Jessica Johnson and Ryan Ermacora, and it is getting its international premiere on Oct. 11 as part of the BFI London Film Festival's Documentary Competition. The drama here isn't who's cheating on whom. The drama is that this film is openly telling the entire documentary establishment that it's done playing by the rules.
The press notes don't mince words. They describe Concrete Turned to Sand as "a radical refusal of the conventional documentary narrative." Translation: no talking heads droning about carbon parts per million. No pie charts.
No soothing narrator telling you what to feel. Instead, Cox's 35mm cinematography plunges viewers into underwater images of shellfish that the film's own team calls "otherworldly" and "almost sci-fi-esque." Sound artist and musician Scott Gailey built the film's soundscape to add what they describe as "another key sensory layer." The production company behind the whole thing is Slag Pile Films, and the project received its world premiere earlier this year at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival in Toronto before making the transatlantic jump to London.
Here's where the real tension lives. The oysters featured in the film take years to reach maturity on the Discovery Islands coast, while the pace of environmental change around them is accelerating at a rate that makes human lifetimes look like a rounding error. Johnson and Ermacora put it bluntly in their own words: "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, but how we understand our own brief presence – and effect – within it." They also confirmed they worked directly with scientists to bring insight into ocean acidification and its impacts, layering in perspectives on the geological timescale of our ecological circumstances.
The film's own description hits a nerve that most docs avoid: "Amid accelerated climate change and lives increasingly hyper-mediated by technology, the film resists the impulse to explain, choosing sensation over exposition." What makes this land differently from every other climate documentary is that it refuses to be comfortable. Cox, whose work on Backrooms gave millions of viewers a creeping sense of dread from empty office hallways and flickering fluorescent lights, has apparently decided that oyster beds can do the same thing.
The directors describe their creative approach as "experimenting with optical and auditory techniques that play with the distanciation between the viewer and the ecological subject of the film," creating what they call "an encounter between the beauty and strangeness of our world." They want audiences to think "beyond our atomization and towards broader ecological understanding and context." Whether the London audience will accept sensation over a neatly packaged explainer remains the open question.
But one thing is certain: nobody is walking out of a Backrooms DP's oyster documentary bored. The receipts are in the film itself — 35mm, no charts, no hand-holding, and a soundscape designed to make you feel the slow, crushing weight of geological time while a shellfish slowly grows a shell. That's not a documentary. That's a dare.
