Watermark

Watermark is a feature documentary from the multiple-award winning film-makers Jennifer Baichwal and Nick de Pencier, and the renowned photographer Edward Burtynsky, marking their second collaboration, after Manufactured Landscapes in 2006. The film brings together diverse stories from around the globe about our relationship with water: how we are drawn to it, what we learn from it, how we use it and the consequences of that use. We see massive floating abalone farms off China’s Fujian coast and the construction site of the biggest arch dam in the world: the Xiluodu. We visit the barren desert delta where the mighty Colorado River no longer reaches the ocean, and the water-intensive leather tanneries of Dhaka. We witness how humans are drawn to water, from the U.S. Open of Surfing in Huntington Beach to the Kumbh Mela in Allahabad, where thirty million people at a time gather for a sacred bath in the Ganges. We speak with scientists who drill ice cores two kilometres deep into the Greenland Ice Sheet, and explore the sublime pristine watershed of northern British Columbia. The film shows water as a terraforming element, as well as the magnitude of our need and use. In Watermark, the viewer is immersed in a magnificent force of nature that we all too often take for granted - until it’s gone.