Nature’s Plea For Help

You can often find lumps of tar on the beach stuck to the bottom of your feet or your shoes. You can also sometimes smell the oil when you stand on the beaches in Goleta, or see it clumped out on the water. 

While much of the oil on the beaches comes from fractures beneath the surface, the worst amount of oil on Santa Barbara’s beaches was from the large spills in 2015 and 1969. The more recent one put over 140,000 gallons of oil into the water — the latter was over 3 million gallons. These spills — which devastated thousands of sea lions, dolphins, and birds — were the starting point of Zizheng “Boris” Liu’s film, Echoes of the Sea.

The writer and director attended UC Santa Barbara only a year after the 2015 spill, and has based his latest film project on the environmental disaster. The short film focuses on two students who find a bird covered in oil on the beach. The bird that they discover turns out to be a dragon, which Liu describes as “nature’s plea for help.” 

Liu, a former Santa Barbara Independent intern who is now a graduate student at USC, has been crafting the film since August. He wants to “connect audiences with the urgency of protecting our environment” through the film’s magical realism.

“Sometimes environmental changes and climate change might not be that obvious, but if you use a beast, it becomes concise,” Liu explained. “You can feel it and see it, and the destruction is huge and more intimate.”

The project is currently seeking funding, and Liu has submitted it to the Santa Barbara International Film Festival to give it more widespread recognition. See the film trailer at https://vimeo.com/886806477. You can learn more about it or contribute at seedandspark.com/fund/echoes-of-the-sea#story.