Avery Osajima in Holding Back the Tide. Image credit: Ben Still. Courtesy of the filmmakers
In Holding Back the Tide, Emily Packer’s “docu-poetic meditation on New York’s oysters,” the humble bivalve becomes much more than the sum of its pearls. Indeed, the experimental filmmaker has inventively chosen to reimagine the once ubiquitous mollusk as a queer icon, and cast the gender-fluid creature alongside a host of other thought-provoking characters, both real and fictional. We’re introduced to folks like Moody “The Mothershucker” Harney (real), who’s bringing oysters back to the average diner through his cart, taking inspiration from Thomas Downing, the 19th-century Black Oyster King of New York. And Pippa Brashear of SCAPE Landscape Architecture, which is harnessing the oyster to protect Staten Island’s Tottenville neighborhood through its Living Breakwaters project. Even former WNBA star Sue Wicks has gotten in on the mollusk action, having retired to her Violet Cove Oyster Co. farm (where she knows each of her bivalves by name).
Between scenes with these colorful individuals in their natural environment are staged encounters with Packer’s gender-unbounded collaborators, who pass along the cinematic baton through striking visuals and lyrical words. A woman emerges from a shell on a beach. Diners feasting on oysters discover a new identity. Social constructs like race and binary categorizations fall by the wayside, ultimately swept out to sea by the power of “we.” Or as the director themself optimistically puts it, “We took inspiration from the oyster, which thrives when connected and fails when isolated.”
Before its theatrical debut, Documentary recently caught up with Packer to learn all about Holding Back the Tide, from its Hurricane Sandy origins to the intersectional queer production process. The film continues playing at DCTV until September 12, followed by an LA premiere at Laemmle Theaters on October 4. Holding Back the Tide was workshopped at DCTV as part of IDA’s DocuClub NY WIP series. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
DOCUMENTARY: Could you talk a bit about the genesis of this project? I know your 2021 short By Way of Canarsie, co-directed with Lesley Steele, likewise dealt with NYC’s waterways.
EMILY PACKER: Lesley and I were both very spiritually drawn to the waterways, often sort of half-joking about our connection to each other as fellow Pisces sign collaborators. We’d begun thinking of the waterways as a way of understanding the city’s modern and ancient histories, as well as a fluid avenue for exploring different communities’ access to city resources, including emotional ones. Our short film investigates the possibility of a commuter ferry in Canarsie—a Brooklyn community surrounded by water with a large Afro-Caribbean population that is historically under-resourced. So we had transit on the brain, and we were also concerned with informing ourselves about how the creatures in the water might be affected.
When I heard about the oyster restoration work being done by Billion Oyster Project, SCAPE, and others, it got me thinking about what we as a city are willing to invest in our future. At the same time, tons of material and financial resources were being poured below the city to improve subway infrastructure after damage done by Hurricane Sandy; but at the last minute, they went with a plan that would disrupt the subway lines less but would only hold up for about a third as long.
Meanwhile, the subway systems are bursting at the seams with every heavy rainfall, and tropical storms have become more common. The scale of the Billion Oyster Project intrigued me, as did the necessary optimism that environmentalists must have in order to enact small steps in the face of climate change. I’d loved being able to include a wide angle of (sometimes contradictory) perspectives and characters tied together through Canarsie Pier, and I wanted to extend the scope to speak about the city at large. The farther my team and I peered into the oyster the more sprawling our interest became, and we began to integrate scripted scenes to reframe the connotations of the oyster as they so aligned with our research-informed perspective. I was grateful to bring Lesley into the fold as a second camera unit to lend her eye to these dreamy scenes.
D: How did you go about casting your characters, both fiction and nonfiction?
EP: We had an extensive interview process that involved a lot of meetings over Zoom. We knew we wanted to cast folks whose presence could speak to the multilayered histories we were referencing. For example, we spoke with and even shot footage with many oyster farmers before we found former WNBA player Sue Wicks, whose oyster farm Violet Cove is featured in the film. Besides having the sweetest voice on the planet, Sue and I really aligned ideologically about what we can learn from nature as queer people, so casting her was a huge win.
In terms of the more fictional elements, we had put out a casting call for the roles that we envisioned, and that’s how we found Aasia Taylor-Patterson, who was new to the city and fresh to acting. Nevertheless, we just felt that she really understood the thematic elements of the film as a trans woman of color. This really rang true when we brought her into more “documentary” scenes, such as the 10th-anniversary vigil remembering Hurricane Sandy. She had a genuine inquisitive and kind temperament that allowed her to environ herself within that community.
Finding her counterpart in Dragonfly (Robin LaVerne Wilson) took a more surprising route. Producer Trey Tetreault and I had been doing research on ecosexuality and got a chance to speak with the movement’s founders, Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle. They introduced us to Dragonfly, whose identities are very fluid and whose playful and purposeful artistic activism was perfect for our take on Aphrodite.
D: Were there individuals or storylines that were left on the cutting room floor?
EP: We definitely had a few storylines that didn’t quite make it into the movie, but did definitely inform our process. One was an oyster aficionado meetup group run by oyster “sommelier” Julie Qiu, who taught us the word “merroir”—a made-up French word that describes the taste of the waters where an oyster is grown, similar to terroir in wine culture. We likewise got to speak with some fascinating folks like the former head of the MTA’s waste department Michael Zaccea, who approved the use of retired subway cars as artificial reefs. I also consulted with Lenape Chief Curtis Zunigha, featured in By Way of Canarsie, about our film’s “water acknowledgement” poem—and got to hear about the hot linguistic debates around the Lenape term for the Hudson River, “shattemuc.”
Other things made it into post-production but felt like they confused our message, like an intense scene of an oyster shucking competition at Billion Oyster Project’s annual party, and another scripted scene with Dragonfly as a dejected, misunderstood humanoid oyster threatening to return to sea. Another thread that we really wanted to include was more of the history of Black oyster farmers in Sandy Ground, Staten Island, one of the earliest communities established by free African Americans, who brought oystering techniques up from the South. While many folks know about this history and are eager to talk about it, we really felt we should hear it from the Sandy Ground Historical Society, an organization that, unfortunately, was out of commission at the time due to flooding by Hurricane Ida. Now that it’s back up and running we hope that more stories can be told in partnership with them, and that they continue to be regarded as the stewards for this important part of New York’s oyster history.
D: Your director’s statement notes that Holding Back the Tide was made with intersectional queer values and queer practices (and LGBTQIA+ collaborators), which made me wonder what exactly that entails. Could you expand on the values and practices aspects a bit more?
EP: We took a lot of inspiration from the oyster itself: a sexually fluid creature that thrives in community. We intentionally forefronted communal practices in the making of the project, and took on a mutual aid style approach to getting our needs met. The team members (many of whom are queer) were also coming from more traditional experiences in the film industry that I often find to be extractive towards both the laborers and the participants. We developed a mode of working in opposition to that, one that was less hierarchical and overly concerned with gatekeeping creative authorship.
Our “queer” praxis was anticapitalist and unconcerned with delineations between subject and author, between roles of crew members, and even between genres. We found freedom in the hybrid form, and in refusing to conform to expectations of a documentary as focused on a single human character or even a neat collection of themes. We leaned into the intersectionality of our subject by using multiple frameworks from which to understand the oyster: as a queer icon, as an economic object of development, as an emblem for Black history, and as a natural resource and part of a larger ecosystem. This amalgamation of approaches felt important for us to include, even when others couldn’t envision these ideas as a coherent piece.
I also love that our film’s creative style is in reference to other historic depictions of the oyster, and sort of jabs at them through that reference. Queerness in some ways is about saying no to those conventions, inventing something new out of the ruins of a heteronormative standard. We accomplish this through parody, allusion, appropriation—focusing the gaze of the audience on Black Queer femmes at the center of the frame and suggesting an alternate legacy of those images and stories.
We loosely based our scripted characters on the Greek myth of Hermaphroditus. In our iteration, Hermaphroditus makes a powerful decision to actualize their gender, empowered by a queer gaze coming from self-recognition in others and in nature. As far as the oyster is concerned, we see their transformation not as a deviation from the heterosexual, but as a key necessary element of their role in the ecosystem, and a testament to their drive for survival. To embody their example, we humans must be willing to embrace change and take actionable steps toward a dream of something we can’t yet fully imagine, even if it means leaving what we know behind. It parallels the resilient beauty of the trans experience, especially as our current political climate has charged living authentically as a queer person with a need for the belief in a humanist future.
D: You’ve also said that the film was produced “with the intention of building and creating community around the filmmaking process.” So did everyone, both onscreen and behind the scenes, have equal say from filming right through to final cut? How did that work?
EP: I think if we’d all had equal say we’d still be in post-production—not because we didn’t develop a shared sense of aesthetic and thematic values, but because the team was stealing time away from our regular lives in order to work on it. This was entirely made possible by forefronting our human needs. Taking time away, being honest with each other about what we could and couldn’t handle, coming to rely on each other after getting to know each other's strengths—it really accomplished something utopic, not just in terms of a “set” but active care for one another.
We never had a real budget for the film, so the main team (who had all been brought on far before their “roles” generally require) was invited to contribute as they could and as they were so inspired. We researched different story beats, and I encouraged everyone to take ownership over the ones they took on, although in the end, we all find evidence of our creative selves quilted throughout the whole piece. I’d been so frustrated in other indie media projects where auteurship capped the creative contributions of a talented team. With this model we were each able to grow so much and find ourselves supported in extending ourselves to new mediums. For example, producer Josh Margolis had originally been brought on to do archival producing, which is his bread and butter. But he and I became so intertwined in terms of envisioning the story as a whole that he started getting heavily involved in the scripted scenes, and eventually became my co-writer for the film overall.
We made a similar invitation to our onscreen participants, offering in-kind support as we were able to and staying in touch about their needs and accomplishments outside of the project. (For Moody, we created the start of a video campaign that focused on the nutritional benefits of oysters, encouraging folks to “Eat yo’ oysters.”) Some of our cast members got more involved with the backend of the production. Aasia Taylor-Patterson helped develop her character through leading insightful conversations about costuming, and actor Meghan Dolbey has come onboard to help us get the film to queer audiences through impact screenings.
D: Finally, I’m quite curious to hear about your DocuClub NY screening at DCTV a couple of years back. What did you learn from that experience? How did it guide you to the final film?
EP: Our experience with DocuClub was fabulous! Being able to watch our rough cut on the big screen with a live audience was totally transformational. There’s so much guesswork and intuition involved in timing out a film’s emotional paces, and the heightened awareness of others’ eyes and the sound of an audience’s breath can do so much. (Until I hear an audience get comfortable laughing, I still hold my own.) Seeing our name on the DCTV’s Firehouse Cinema marquee was such a boon, and I remember being totally blown away by both the cinema space and by how the film felt with such a good sound system even with our editors’ preliminary sound mixing (which also deserves kudos).
At the time, we were still unsure of how to frame the piece overall, and we struggled internally to know if the basics of what we were communicating were getting across. We had a good sense of the possible direction of each scene and had tried a few iterations of a rough order, but needed feedback about structure, legibility, affability of each character, and so on.
It was a tall order, and DocuClub asked us to identify a moderator who would help us elicit answers from the crowd as well as an editing consultant who could help us interpret that feedback into an actionable plan. I had seen Alexandra Juhas moderate a complex Q&A at UnionDocs a few years prior, and had been so impressed with her intentional command of a conversation that never wandered into unproductive territory. I don’t think I’d even been aware of her background in queer feminist writing and filmography then, but she was such a perfect fit to guide our test audience in a generous critical feedback session.
I remember one of the more surprising pieces of feedback was that the audience overwhelmingly felt optimistic after the screening. Accepting that optimism after we’d sort of intended to make a realist, more critical piece was a huge gift from that first audience. We’d also been trying to work out if we needed any text onscreen to ground the filmic “map” of New York, and luckily felt supported to abandon it after this screening. Ultimately, the feedback helped us to lean into our stylistic desires and assured us that the film was emotionally reading; we could let it be what it wanted to be without forcing additional framework to explain ourselves.
In fact, different audience members seemed to connect with different elements of the story, so the crowd was divided when asked to identify the main theme. This let me know that we were giving each of the themes enough due that they could be entry points for different types of audiences, which is more or less my dream reception scenario. After the screening we consulted with editor Todd Chandler, who helped us strategize some structural changes to address lingering concerns. Our team had been picturing the film as a circle that meets back up with itself; Todd helped us envision that circle with small waves that crash into themselves to maximize the impact of each scene that we spent time in.
We continued to edit the film for about 6 months after the feedback screening, and we still think of it as a pivotal moment in our post-production process. Now we’re excited to take the film back to DCTV’s Firehouse Cinema for our theatrical premiere (September 6-12th).
Lauren Wissot is a film critic and journalist, filmmaker and programmer, and a contributing editor at both Filmmaker magazine and Documentary magazine. She also writes regularly for Modern Times Review (The European Documentary Magazine) and has served as the director of programming at the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival and the Santa Fe Independent Film Festival.