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.

“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).6pm doors, 6:30 screening, 7:50 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 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.