How 'Watermark' Embraced Its Cinematic Possibilities

"Human beings are all naturally, instinctively drawn to water,” says Jennifer Baichwal, the Canadian filmmaker of documentary  Watermark. It comes eight years after its co-directors, Baichwal and renowned photographer Edward Burtynsky, collaborated on Manufactured Landscapes, a visual portrait of the vast scale of industrial spaces in China.

“Ed's photographs have a way of drawing you into places that we're connected to and responsible for, but we'd never normally see,” Baichwal says. “In Manufactured Landscapes, we tried to do that by looking at these cycles of production and how they tie us to these vast spaces. In Watermark it was trying to trace these iconic interactions that humans have with water, and the way we bend and shape water to our needs.”

The idea came about when Burtynsky was commissioned to do a photo-essay for National Geographic on water use in California, where the distant Colorado River is redirected to turn arid desert into an agricultural hub in the “terraformed” Imperial Valley. “I live thousands of miles from there, but there's a very good chance that if I'm eating a salad in the middle of a Toronto winter, it was irrigated from the Colorado River. Seventy per cent of people's water usage is for agriculture, and that's something we're all connected to. So the film was always going to be about industrialised agriculture, and globalisation. But it's also about our connection to water in a spiritual way; Kumbh Mela is the largest gathering of humans in one place anywhere, period, and it happens to be a pilgrimage to bathe in the Ganges. It's an astonishing thing to even think about, let alone film: what does 30 million people in the one place, all drawn to the water, look like?”

The “cinematic possibilities” of the subject were a huge draw for Baichwal and Burtynsky, and Watermark embraces them, beginning with an amazing slow-motion shot of turgid water thundering out of Yellow River dam's 'silt release'. The film navigates 20 stories set across ten countries condensed into 92 minutes, fashioning a “non-traditional narrative” its makers hoped would flow like a river, avoiding the journalistic or didactic qualities of many protest documentaries. From there, Watermark shows water as art (a Las Vegas hotel fountain), as source of ecosystem equilibrium (a stream in First Nations Canada), as sports-field (a US Surfing contest), as record of environmental conditions (ice cores extracted from underground in Greenland), and as industrial grist for medieval horrors (a leather tannery in Bangladesh). Shot in ultra-high-definition digital, it looks at landscapes both natural and radically altered from great distances. “The scale of water is so vast, it's really something that can only be understood from the air. So we used lots of remote helicopters, real helicopters, lifts, poles; anything that could get us elevation. Then, we tied that wide view to the singularity of people's lives as they interact with that water, intimately, on a very human level.”