An oyster built New York, and it might help save it. In the new documentary, “Holding Back the Tide,” director Emily Packer turns the harbor’s shape-shifting mollusk into a guide to the city’s relationship to its water.

Packer created an impressionist, hybrid documentary that follows the New Yorkers rebuilding reefs like the Billion Oyster Project. And she uncovers histories of Black entrepreneurship and Indigenous stewardship, even considering the queerness of oyster communities. (Oysters can change gender and only thrive in a community.)

“I try, I think with all of the films that I make, to be really looking at the subject through a multiplicative, intersectional feminist perspective,” says Packer, “meaning taking into account where are the marginal folks whose stories may or may not be told in the traditional forms of storytelling around this thing.”

In this episode, Next City’s Equitable Cities Reporting Fellow Eliana Perozo talks with Packer about why the film avoids pearl mythology and how climate change is already reshaping neighborhoods. It’s a story about restoring ecosystems while rebuilding the social fabric that makes resilience possible.

“We are starting to see it in our own backyards in different ways,” Packer says on the impacts of climate change. “I think that there has been this idea of climate change occurring, but not, it's here, it's happening.”

Listen to the episode below or subscribe to the Next City podcast on Apple, Spotify or Goodpods.

This post was originally published on Next City.