Watermark: A Canadian Documentary

Open with power. Water rushing. A rumble of waves and silt. Cut to a silent riverbed. Cracked, dry, a virtual desert.

Watermark is a Canadian documentary about, as Edward Burtynsky puts it, “how water shapes us, and how we shape water.” The film is a collaboration between Burtynsky, who is known for his stunning large scale photography projects, and Jennifer Baichwal, an award winning documentarian. It was a selection for the Antigonish International Film Festival in 2014. We had the honour of being a title sponsor for the film, which was screened at noon on Friday, October 17th in the Cineplex Capitol Theatre.

Watermark is the kind of film that’s worth seeing on the big screen. The narrative is loosely structured around the production of a book. Throughout the film, Burtynsky is shown working with graphic designers and his publisher to shape up photos for publication. The videocamera travels from the creative studio to places around the globe like the Xiluodu Dam in China, the River Ganges in India, and the High Plains of Texas in the US. It also goes deep into the Greenland Ice Sheet to show us how the history of the planet is written in layers of ice that have been frozen for millennia.

The point of showing all these places is that water is important, very important, to every human life and every human society. The film doesn’t preach, but it does invite the viewer to pay attention to some very large scale human projects and the incredible complexity of our contemporary relationship to water.

Xiluodu Dam in China