Zack Grant examines a Brittany cat-astrophe

What do you expect to find along a craggy coastline? A shell or two? The snag of seaweed? Maybe even a crab?

Probably not thousands of novelty Garfield phones...

Yet that is exactly what has been washing up on the shores of Brittany for decades, after a shipping container filled with the plastic handsets was lost at sea in the 1980s.

Working closely with the local community, 2020land director Zack Grant's Silly Little Plastic Cat documentary for BackMarket traces the strange story behind the orange debris, meeting the people who have spent years clearing it from the beaches and piecing together how it came to be there.

However, while the telling of the tale has a whimsical quality at first, Grant wastes no time in connecting the oddity to the very real issues for which it provides such a neat visual metaphor: ocean pollution, rampant consumerism and society’s lack of meaningful commitment to sustainability.

It’s here that the lovable tale takes on a more serious ecological tone, using the brand’s positioning as a reviver of doomed tech as the perfect platform for a message that’s as odd as it is important.