Holding Back the Tide

by Emily Packer

This quirky, playful film combines climate change, sustainability, oysters, New York, and trans rights into one zany, joyful work.

2023 · 1h17m · United States

English

English subs

About the Film

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 apart and carefully
returned to sea. A chorus of farmers, diners, sous chefs,
fishmongers, activists, and landscape architects colloquializes
the oyster’s many lifecycles. 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 nonhuman 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.

Upcoming Screenings

Stay tuned for upcoming screenings!

About the Director

Emily Packer

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Emily Packer is the director/producer of the new documentary, Holding Back the Tide, opens September 6 at DCTV’s Firehouse Cinema in New York City and October 4 at Laemmle Theatres in Los Angeles, via Grasshopper Film. Emily’s directorial work has been screened at film festivals and theaters across the country, including at Anthology Film Archives, BlackStar, DOCNYC, and others. Emily’s short most recent film By Way of Canarsie, which she co-directed with Lesley Steele, is streaming on the Criterion Channel and was a part of POV Shorts Season 6. As an editor, Emily’s work has been featured in the New Yorker, PBS, and on Vimeo Staff Picks. Emily also serves on programming committees for film festivals in New York City, was a fellow in the 2018 Collaborative Studio at UnionDocs in Brooklyn, and is a proud alumna of the anomalous Hampshire College. Emily collects voicemails for future use; consider yourself notified.

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Other films by Emily Packer