As a nature documentary whose chief purpose is to say something about protecting the environment, Emily Packer’s unique film has a significant advantage: it’s about an animal that is considered a kind of luxury food, the oyster. Limiting her setting to New York City and vicinity shorelines where oyster farming was once a lucrative undertaking, she taps into a colorful local ethnographic history that provides structure to her story. Consequently, she decided to use professional actors as dramatic onscreen narrators and witnesses and not just people and organizations who are directly involved in the oyster trade, though sometimes it’s difficult to tell, since even the genuine fishmongers depicted have a poetic style.

One of the first oyster traits that Packer latches on to is that they change gender over the course of their lives, usually from male to female, which makes it possible for them to fertilize their own eggs. The movie emphasizes this capability by having people of indistinct sexual identity present and interact with the narrative, showing how the shellfish’s adaptability makes it not only the ultimate survivor, but tasty in a sublime way. There’s a related sensuality to the presentation that plays up the oyster as a perfect food, meaning one that doesn’t need preparation or added ingredients (“serve it with lemon…if you must”). Even the shell, which, after all, produces pearls from irritants, has its own special visual charm that’s been an inspiration to artists for centuries. Environmentally, of course, oysters remove excess algae and other byproducts of pollution, which is why there are more than half a dozen NGOs in the NYC area alone working to reseed oyster beds. Such work not only keeps the water around New York cleaner, but provides work and marine produce for innumerable businesses like restaurants and hotels. 

But the most intriguing aspect of Packer’s film is its lively history of oyster farming, which in the past—meaning the 18th and 19th centuries—was carried out by people of color, who do the bulk of the explaining here, whether they are representing the past or the here-and-now. The oyster, as it were, is not only the perfect food, but the most honest representative earth product of New York’s multicultural industrial revolution. It’s ironic, then, that in the 20th century the oyster has become synonymous with high living white people, since only they could afford a food that, due to scarcity born of a damaged environment, became a delicacy. Holding Back the Tide is most edifying when it points out that oysters were once a common edible for all peoples, regardless of class or income. By boosting the oyster population to its once abundant levels, these people will not only help realign New York’s salt water ecology, but make the oyster a food that everyone can enjoy anytime. 

Now playing in Tokyo at Theater Image Forum Aoyama (03-5766-0114).

Holding Back the Tide home page in Japanese

photo (c) Marginal Gap Films 2023