Director Emily Packer’s HOLDING BACK THE TIDE 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 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 re-imaging 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. HOLDING BACK THE TIDE is an impressionist hybrid documentary traces the oyster through its many life cycles in New York, once the world’s oyster capital. 
Now their specter haunts the city through queer characters embodying ancient myth, discovering the overlooked history and biology of the bivalve that built the city. As environmentalists restore them to the harbor, Holding Back The Tide looks to the oyster as a queer icon, entangled with nature, with much to teach about our continued survival. Director Emily Packer joins us for a conversation on her own journey into the world of oysters, why she decided to embark on a documentary about oysters and how that turned into an immersive and empowering enterprise.
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For more go to: holdingbackthetidefilm.com
Holding Back the Tide opens October 4th in LA at Laemmle Theatres
About the filmmaker – Emily Packer (she/they) is an experimental filmmaker and editor with an interest in geography and hybrid formats. Their directorial work has been screened at film festivals and theaters across the country, including at Anthology Film Archives, BlackStar, DOCNYC, and others. Emily’s short film By Way of Canarsie, which she co-directed with Lesley Steele, is streaming on the Criterion Channel and was a part of POV Shorts Season 6. Her archival film Too Long Here, which Criterioncast called “a fascinating, important work” about the inauguration of an international park, has been used as an advocacy tool for its preservation. As an editor, Emily’s work has been featured in the New Yorker (The Victorias by Ethan Fuirst), on PBS (When I’m Her by Emily Schuman), and on Vimeo Staff Picks. Her feature film editorial experience spans indie narrative (Newfest darling Summer Solstice by Noah Schamus), experimental nonfiction (Catalina Jordan Alvarez’s forthcoming Sound Spring), historical arthouse fiction (Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich’s The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire), and personal essay film (a hybrid feature by Lynne Sachs currently in development). In addition to her editing and directing work, Emily serves on programming committees for film festivals in New York City and guest-curated the Coastal Knowledge series for the Rockaway Film Festival in 2021. They were a fellow in the 2018 Collaborative Studio at UnionDocs in Brooklyn, and are a proud alumna of the anomalous Hampshire College. Emily collects voicemails for future use; consider yourself notified.
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Reviews:
“A quirky, lyrical love letter to oysters in NYC, this engaging documentary plumbs the history of the bivalves, their pollution-fueled decline, and their inspiring revival, finding poetry and charm in an unlikely subject” – Indiewire
“Poetic filming of familiar city scenes combine with fascinating archival photos for a watery love letter to the city. Lovingly crafted and scored with flair, the film both embraces humor and nods to the gender-fluid nature of oysters.”– Karen McMullen
“A treatise on how oysters might save us environmentally and socially” – Boulder Weekly.