Noticias

Opening today at Cinema Village in New York is Ben Kalina’s Shored Up, a documentary tackling the issue of rising tides and coastal development. From the film’s website: Our beaches and coastline are a national treasure, a shared resource, a beacon of sanity in a world of constant change…and they’re disappearing in front of us. Shored Up is a documentary that asks tough questions about our coastal communities and our relationship to the land. What will a rising sea do to our homes, our businesses, and the survival of our communities? Can we afford to pile enough sand on our […]...

Opening today at Cinema Village in New York is Ben Kalina’s Shored Up, a documentary tackling the issue of rising tides and coastal development. From the film’s website: Our beaches and coastline are a national treasure, a shared resource, a beacon of sanity in a world of constant change…and they’re disappearing in front of us. Shored Up is a documentary that asks tough questions about our coastal communities and our relationship to the land. What will a rising sea do to our homes, our businesses, and the survival of our communities? Can we afford to pile enough sand on our […]...

In Shored Up, director Ben Kalina has provided a sort of Occupy Wall Street: Beach Edition.

This is a sober look at how seaboards are vulnerable to a rise in ocean levels, made worse by storms and massively worse by massive storms. Our seemingly innate desire to hang on to disappearing sand, which is essentially what our barrier islands are, is beautifully illustrated by the film's cinematography and historical footage.

Kalina has explored what he calls the "intersection of science, culture, and the environment" before, and started this documentary about the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' beach replenishment project along the New Jersey shore before Sandy shoved civilization around and set this story in sharp relief.

He acknowledges the inspiration of ...

Philadelphia -- In the documentary "Shored Up," scientists warn that with a rising sea level, a major storm could put New Jersey's barrier islands underwater and create devastating storm surges. In other words, what happened last month when Superstorm Sandy slammed into New Jersey and New York.

For Ben Kalina, the Philadelphia filmmaker who was nearly finished putting together the documentary when the storm hit, it meant that the ideas in the film that may have sounded far-fetched – or at least, discussions of something that may happen sometime in the future – were suddenly immediate.

"Until Sandy, we were making a film about something much more meditative, really," Kalina said. "And now the stakes are suddenly much more real."

It also meant Kalina and his crew had more shooting to do, revisiting places they'd shot – some of which were wiped away by Sandy.

That again pushed back the completion date for...