Dirs: Ryan Ermacora, Jessica Johnson | Doc 2026
Shot on 35mm, Concrete Turned to Sand takes a radically different approach to documentary filmmaking, one rarely seen on screen. The film comes alive through Jeremy Cox’s striking cinematography, whose work on the acclaimed Backrooms was widely noted for its distinctive visual precision. Here, shimmering underwater images, tidal landscapes and haunting nocturnal scenes transform oyster farming into something almost otherworldly.
Choosing sensation over exposition, the filmmakers dispense with conventional interviews, statistics and explanatory commentary, instead creating a strange, observational yet beautiful encounter with non-human forms of life. Oyster farming becomes a lens through which different scales of time collide: the years required for an oyster to grow, the accelerating pace of environmental change and the deep time of the Earth itself.
By placing human labour and scientific observation within these vastly different temporalities, the film, asks us to reconsider not only how we look at our changing environment, but also how we understand our own brief presence within it. Meditative, visually arresting and quietly unsettling, Concrete Turned to Sand is as much a philosophical reflection on what it means to be here at all as it is an ecological documentary.
SCREENING DURING BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 2026