Wind rustling through fields of grass; deep thunder; water, gushing along a shore. We see in a low, still wide shot, a man dragging a hose over a hill, seeming to be draining one section of water to another.
Wind rustling through fields of grass; deep thunder; water, gushing along a shore. We see in a low, still wide shot, a man dragging a hose over a hill, seeming to be draining one section of water to another.
If you hadn’t read anything about As the Tide Comes In before viewing it, it might take some time to consciously register that you’re observing scenery of the Danish island Mandø, which, in the middle of the Wadden Sea, has just 27 residents and is at great risk of being entirely flooded in the coming decades due to climate change.
Such a fragmented, slow and indirect approach to revealing information reflects the overall tone of Juan Palacios’ documentary, which, using mostly still shots or extremely slow, mesmerising dolly zooms, invites us into more of a ‘being-with’, curious meditation on the people of Mandø and their relationship to place.
We gather facts about the island as inhabitants listen to the news, watch old documentaries, overhear tour guides talking to tourists, and, most of all, when they talk amongst each other.
The local we spend the most time with is 42-year-old Gregers, the youngest of the island and also the last farmer. His story is interwoven with the eldest of the island, 99-year-old Mei.
We first see Gregers in his car, watching an episode on his phone of Farmer Wants a Wife. Later we find out he has applied for the show, reflecting his ongoing desire for a romantic companion and his wish to continue living on the island against the odds of its demise.
It might seem that a narrative thread about Gregers wanting a wife is irrelevant to a documentary about an island threatened by climate change, but it is precisely these small, human, and often light-hearted details that adds a grounded and relatable entry-point to the overarching theme.
Climate change is ongoing, yet, at least for many of us, its effects on a day-to-day level are slow, brooding and gradual—it’s validating to watch a documentary on climate change which sinks into mundanity rather than opts for endless climaxes and shocks. In long, still shots of a resident buying groceries, for instance, we are given space to ponder, and in many ways feel how this mirrors our own lives. Seeing such realism on screen has a strange eeriness.
Another layer to this mundanity, however, is a subtle sense of denial. In almost all shots, nature features just as much if not more than the residents. This is particularly palpable in sound—we almost feel the wind, the rain, the call of the birds in Peter Albrechtsen’s sound design, adding a subconscious, subliminal layer of unease to many moments. “It’s just a bit of wind,” says a wife as she shaves her husband’s beard. But perhaps what’s also striking about this is how accustomed the residents are to it all. Two ladies play remote bingo via radio transmitter on an uproariously windy night, seeming more concerned by their game being disrupted than the potential dangers of the weather. It’s comical, curious, strange, disturbing, scary, relatable, poignant…
And also extremely intimate. The naturalness of each conversation between locals is such that I almost wonder if it’s scripted.
Palacio says in an interview at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam that these conversations were all spontaneous, but such naturalness was enabled by creating the conditions for locals to feel comfortable around the camera.
Co-director Sofie Husum Johannesen, who is a Danish visual anthropologist, spent many weeks developing a rapport with the islanders before filming started.
Palacio, whose previous films are not documentaries but rather experimental video and visual-diary film essays, says that he spent a lot of time planning how different locals might enter into interactions from which contrasting threads and themes could emerge.
Such contrast is evident when Gregers talks to his friend. “The people on Mandø don’t stand a chance,” the friend says to Gregers, sitting in a shed with a dead goose they’ve hunted. “So they choose to believe that the problem will go away. But it won’t.” Gregers responds, “but things have always changed.”
Observing different viewpoints locals hold in a fragmented, meditative way allows us to appreciate a sense of complexity.
The visual editing is testament to this impartial layering of contrasts. We see a shot of Gregers controlling a drone, attempting to shoo away birds that eat too much of his field, followed by another shot of the island’s birdwatcher, Niels, who laments about the rare birds who don’t visit the island anymore. In another, we slowly dolly-zoom towards a computer system which predicts the weather, suggesting a more technical approach to climate change, followed by another shot of a priest in the local church telling a biblical story about flooding.
“There was no intended social message in this,” says Palacio in an interview with Variety. We are simply invited to meditate on how one corner of the world is grappling with the complexity of it all, going on living in the way they know how to live amidst an underlying sense that something is about to change, the tide is about to come in. For me, at least, before I reach out habitually and problematically for the next amygdala-fuelled freak out, this sort of spacious meditation on it all feels like exactly what I need.
AS THE TIDE COMES IN will screen as a part of the 72nd edition of the Melbourne International Film Festival on the 16th and 23rd of August. Streaming via ACMI is available from the 9th to the 25th of August.