Holding Back the Tide

Synopsis

Holding Back the Tide celebrates the oyster as a queer icon, taking the bivalve as an entry point into the coastal and cultural worlds of New York City, once known as the oyster capital of the world. The oyster—a protandrous hermaphrodite capable of changing from male to female and back—serves as a lens through which transness emerges as both natural and necessary, an integral part of communal and ecological life. Inspired by the oyster’s fluidity, this hybrid film flows between characters, places, and temporalities, seamlessly blending scripted and unscripted scenes. Against a bleak backdrop of climate catastrophe, Director Emily Packer offers a set of surprisingly hopeful narratives, as New Yorkers work together to rebuild oyster reefs and reclaim their coastal histories. Holding Back the Tide situates queer ecologies and grassroots organizing at the heart of ocean justice movements, bringing alternate futures into being through acts of care, resistance, and renewal.

Director Bio

Emily Packer (she/they) is an experimental filmmaker and editor with an interest in geography and hybrid formats. Their 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 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. Her archival film “Too Long Here,” which Criterioncast called “a fascinating, important work” about the inauguration of an international park, has been used as an advocacy tool for its preservation. As an editor, Emily’s work has been featured in the New Yorker, PBS, and on Vimeo Staffpicks. Her feature film editorial experience spans indie narrative, experimental nonfiction, historical arthouse fiction, and personal essay film. In addition to her editing and directing work, Emily serves on programming committees for film festivals in New York City. They were a fellow in the 2018 Collaborative Studio at UnionDocs in Brooklyn, and are a proud alumna of the anomalous Hampshire College. Emily collects voicemails for future use; consider yourself notified.

Distribution

Grasshopper Film
https://store.grasshopperfilm.com/holding-bafck-the-tide.html
Contact:  kazu@grasshopperfilm.com

 

One thing that the film has really taught me is to double down in the local and in our immediate community, to utilize those environmental, anarchist, community-forward values in how we relate to each other and how we go about our individual choices. It is going to take a network of those small actions to make a difference.