HOLDING BACK THE TIDE
A film by Emily Packer
2023, 77 minutes
2023, 77 minutes
No. 442
Documentary
Documentary
Description
A woman swallows a pearl. A subway car falls to the ocean floor. A deluge bursts through the cracks of New York City. In every borough, oyster shells are pried open and carefully returned to sea. A chorus of farmers, diners, sous chefs, fishmongers, activists, and landscape architects colloquializes the oyster’s many life cycles. These educational snapshots about the bivalve’s ecological role, mating habits, communal living, and historical presence take on new meaning and flirt with the mythic. Underwater dances and poetic addresses blend the human and non human worlds. The oyster as a water filter, carbon capturer, storm barrier, and habitat maker transcends its environmental promise and becomes a queer icon of New York City’s unlikely survival story.
Retracing cyclical ecologies for the largest metropolitan area in the United States calls upon an existential reimaging of a sustainable future. Out with the narratives of bootstraps and capitalist urban individualism; in with the water-bound, the intergenerational, the queer collectivity. Once New York City was built by the oysters. Now, it is built anew.
Retracing cyclical ecologies for the largest metropolitan area in the United States calls upon an existential reimaging of a sustainable future. Out with the narratives of bootstraps and capitalist urban individualism; in with the water-bound, the intergenerational, the queer collectivity. Once New York City was built by the oysters. Now, it is built anew.
Festivals
Official Selection, DOC NYC
Official Selection, Thessaloniki Intl. Documentary Film Festival
Official Selection, Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival
Official Selection, SF Urban Film Festival
Reviews
“Holding Back The Tide is wonderful! Makes the stationary lives of oysters Into a wondrous tale… Their history is tied up with the history of race and labor; their disappearance from some areas tells a story about pollution and environmental decay. And oysters can change gender during their lives, with most starting out as male and transitioning to female after the first year of life, which gives them the capacity to fertilize their own eggs…. By the end, Holding Back the Tide feels like both an elegy and a prophecy, looking toward both past and future to imagine what kind of possibilities oysters represent.” – Alissa Wilkinson, The New York Times
“Poetic filming of familiar city scenes combine with fascinating archival photos for a watery love letter to the city. Lovingly crafted and scored with flair, the film both embraces humor and nods to the gender-fluid nature of oysters.”– Karen McMullen
“A treatise on how oysters might save us environmentally and socially” - Boulder Weekly
