The new documentary examining the Chesapeake Bay community has drawn raves from the festival circuit for its unflinching portrayal of locals who view the ocean currently swallowing their living rooms as a matter of complex philosophical debate.
Not since Robert Flaherty's Man of Aran has the sheer, stubborn friction between man and the sea been rendered with such exquisite denial; though one might argue that while Flaherty's subjects merely battled the waves, the subjects of Been Here Stay Here elevate the documentary form by simply deciding the waves do not exist. The film, which chronicles the rapid submergence of Tangier Island beneath the Chesapeake Bay, captures a community steeped in the kind of radical epistemological skepticism last seen in the late-period texts of French post-structuralism, or perhaps the third season of MTV's Pimp My Ride, wherein the fundamental reality of a rusted chassis was routinely ignored in favor of installing a chocolate fountain in the dashboard.
The central tension of the film arises from what the director terms a complicated dynamic, a phrase that does heavy, perhaps Atlas-like lifting to describe the juxtaposition of conservative Chesapeake watermen asserting the immutability of their shoreline while actively treading water in their own kitchens. It is a stunning rejection of empiricism; the islanders do not merely doubt man-made climate change, but rather engage in a breathtaking, durational performance piece in which the rising tide is treated as a liberal abstraction rather than a physical liquid entering their boots.
The water is there, certainly, and it is undeniably destroying their homes, but to focus on the mere physical presence of the estuary is to miss the textual richness of their ideological commitment to drowning.
One is forced to marvel at the sheer stamina of their delusion, a cognitive dissonance so pure it transcends the pedestrian bounds of rural conservatism and enters the realm of the sublime. When a local crabber looks directly into the lens and insists the shoreline is exactly where it was in his grandfather's day, even as a school of striped bass swims casually through his hallway, we are no longer watching a socio-political profile; we are bearing witness to a breathtaking triumph of the human spirit over the tyranny of objective measurement.
In its final act, the documentary achieves a sort of sublime, suffocating crescendo reminiscent of the durational stillness in Michael Snow's Wavelength; the camera lingers on a town hall meeting that is entirely submerged under four feet of the bay, observing with clinical detachment as the locals continue to stubbornly legislate. The residents, communicating through a complex series of muffled underwater gestures, debate the zoning ordinances of crab shacks that have belonged to the Atlantic Ocean since 2019, cementing their legacy not as tragic victims of a changing climate, but as the most fiercely committed avant-garde artists the eastern seaboard has yet produced.