Holding Back the Tide explores New York City’s oyster history through a queer lens
HOLDING BACK THE TIDE (Emily Packer, 2023)
DCTV Firehouse Cinema
87 Lafayette St.
September 6-12
212-966-4510
www.dctvny.org
www.holdingbackthetidefilm.com
In the hybrid documentary Holding Back the Tide, director and cowriter Emily Packer delves into the long history of New York City and oysters, visiting such spots as the Gowanus Canal, Grand Central Terminal, Governors Island, the Battery Park SeaGlass Carousel, the Brooklyn Children’s Museum, the Staten Island Ferry, the Union Square Greenmarket, Jamaica Bay, and Violet Cove to trace their relation to the delicious mollusks. At each stop, Packer shares details about how oysters are raised, served, and preserved, topics that have taken on new importance during the major expansions of the waterfront that have thrived since the Bloomberg administration.
Packer also highlights oysters’ ability to switch gender — the mollusks are born male, and most become female within a year or two — to honor the LGBTQIA+ community, interspersing numerous scripted scenes into the film, which is “dedicated to the queer future.”
“All things living transform. We build, break, morph, become, and become ourselves again. The tides rise and fall, a rock turns to sand, an island is named, renamed, and made a city,” Aphrodite (Robin LaVerne Wilson aka Dragonfly) says early on, walking barefoot along the rocks. “No river is endless. All oceans meet the shore. And in the end, in the best case, we return to the beginning.”
Exploring harbor restoration, coastal protection, commercialization, and more, Packer meets with a wide-ranging group of environmentalists and entrepreneurs who are never identified, including Mothershuckers founder Ben “Moody” Harney, former WNBA star and current oyster farmer Sue Wicks, commercial fishermen Wade Karlin and Phil Karlin of PE & DD Seafood, Cornell Cooperative Extension shellfish hatchery manager Joshua Perry, CCE SPAT director Kim Tetrault, resilience planner Pippa Brashear, Gowanus Dredgers founder Owen Foote, and Tanasia Swift, Agata Poniatowski, and John Ribaudo of Billion Oyster Project. The nonfiction scenes are fun and informative, filmed on location as the people go about their daily business.
The fiction scenes, featuring actors Aasia Taylor-Patterson, TL Thompson, Hannah Rego, Thomas Annunziata, Meghan Dolbey, Katharine Antonia Nedder, Avery Nusbaum, Hilary Asare, and Marlena Ospina, have a New Age-y atmosphere, like mini-fantasies with poetry, lilting music, and underwater choreography, making it often feel like you’re watching two different films. A nonbinary couple slurp oysters at an otherwise empty Grand Central Oyster Bar, then go to the whisper gallery, hearing the sound of the ocean. A server shucks oysters in front of Delmonico’s in the Financial District. A pair of performers pose like Wisdom and Felicity, two of the figures in the Bailey Fountain at Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn.
“Holding Back the Tide was made with intersectional queer values, queer practices, and LGBTQIA+ collaborators. As a nonbinary 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,” Packer explains in their director’s statement. “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. . . . 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.”
Holding Back the Tide is running September 6-12 at DCTV Firehouse Cinema, with Q&As September 6 at 7:00 with Packer and Pete Malinowski of Billion Oyster Project, moderated by DCTV’s Dara Messinger; September 7 at 6:30 with comedian Esther Fallick and friends; September 8 at 5:00 with Packer and journalist Bedatri Choudhury; September 10 at 7:00 with Packer and filmmaker Lynne Sachs; and September 11 at 7:00 with Harney, aka the Real Mothershucker.