IN CINEMA
HOLDING BACK THE TIDE
Thursday, January 23rd at 7PM
Tickets: $15 General Admission / $7 Reduced Price
Emily Packer, 2023, 77 min.
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 the sea. A chorus of farmers, diners, sous chefs, fishmongers, activists, and landscape architects colloquializes the oyster’s many life cycles. 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.
Post-screening discussion with Emily Packer (director), Trey Tetreault (producer), John Marty (director of photography) to follow!
flooded subway
oyster shack
