Holding Back The Tide

Holding Back the Tide was made with intersectional queer values, queer practices, and LGBTQIA+ collaborators. As a non binary queer filmmaker working with a subject that regularly changes its sex as part of its reproductive process, it was important for me to create a vision of the oysters’ cultural economy that celebrated the environmental heroism of the oyster through a queer perspective. Not only are most of the characters and actors queer people, but they also come to see that their gender evolution and self-actualization are reflected in nature. The film sees this reflection as necessary for cultural transformation and building a sustainable future. In engaging with these themes, the film avoids rigid definitions or hierarchy of knowledge sources. Concepts are allowed to collide and blend. The boundaries blur between documentary and fiction, ecology and economy, individual and community, food and living creature, oysters and humans, past, present, and future. The film is shaped cyclically, as recursive crashing waves that revisit brief encounters with subjects, each revisit revealing new possibilities. Our creative choices are deeply rooted in our research and incorporate our subjects’ Black, Indigenous, immigrant, and working class histories. We subvert the oyster’s “classic” connotations of wealth and heterosexual aphrodisia, reframing old tropes through an intersectional and anti-capitalist lens.

The film was produced with the intention of building and creating community around the filmmaking process. I assembled the team out of my talented friends from the industry who shared my desire for an alternative to traditional hierarchical and extractive filmmaking practices. My frustration in feeling creatively limited in what we could make or contribute to on other projects. I was motivated by a reaction to traditional extractive practices in the modern film industry which affect the wellbeing of crew as well as documentary trends towards character documentary. We took inspiration from the oyster, which thrives when connected and fails when isolated. All team members were extensively involved in early discussions and pre-production, imbuing a sense of collective ownership of the film. The team’s roles and responsibilities were consciously flexible and able to evolve as our skills and interests developed. This collectivity was mirrored in our decision to decenter a singular human character and allowed us to find the poetic voice for the film as a prismatic city symphony, a mosaic portrait that employs different filmmaking styles threaded cohesively via emotive association. The aesthetic values of the film intersected with our filmmaking approach and extended to our collaboration with our film’s human subjects. We supported them with in-kind media exchanges and used their input to find the film’s scope and messaging. We used the film as an inciting cause to connect oyster farmers to activists, nonprofits to entrepreneurs, enthusiasts with historians, and so on, for a web of reciprocal relationships that will expand beyond the film itself.

When I started this film, I was curious to discover what lengths the largest city in the U.S. would go to for the sake of its own posterity. I was interested in the small, measureable contributions of the individual towards monumental and collective goals. When I learned about the large-scale oyster restoration in New York Harbor, it brought up questions about necessary optimism in the face of a seemingly inevitable threat and what it means to work towards change in a sinking city. Holding Back the Tide involved many individuals coming together and volunteering their time in service of a collective vision, guided by shared values; making this movie has shown me that in the face of the impossible, collective action opens up real and impressive possibility.