HOLDING BACK THE TIDE +Filmmaker's Q&A
Sat, Jan 18
|Epsilon Spires
Reconsider the oyster! A hybrid documentary tracing the oyster through its many life cycles in New York, once the world’s oyster capital. As environmentalists restore them to the harbor, we look to the oyster as a queer icon, entangled with nature, with much to teach about our continued survival.
Time & Location
Jan 18, 2025, 7:00 PM – 11:00 PM
Epsilon Spires, 190 Main St, Brattleboro, VT 05301, USA
About the event
“Sensuous, probing, militant...Part labor history, part environmental essay, part celebration of the profound and sexy weirdness of this creature... the film carves out a space for both activism and pleasure.”- Filmmaker Courtney Stephens
HOLDING BACK THE TIDE (Directed by Emily Packer, 77 mins). 7pm doors, 7:30 screening followed by Filmmaker Q&A. 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 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…