Low Tide (Eva Kolcze, 2019) (Patreon)

Some films are small, intimate gestures that simply take stock of the world around us, using sound and image to describe natural cycles that tend to elude our perception because they engulf us. Low Tide by Canadian filmmaker Eva Kolcze is a brief but patient accrual of detail around the Toronto Islands. Surrounded by two bodies of water (Lake Ontario and Lake Iroquois), the islands are subject to natural erosion. But the rock formations are blended with concrete slabs which are intended to stem that erosion.

Kolcze constructs her film as a series of fixed-frame shots, each lasting about seven or eight seconds. In a sense, this gives Low Tide a sturdiness that echoes the formation of the islands themselves, comprised as they are of layer upon layer of massive monoliths that, despite their apparent immobility, are constantly shifting bit by bit. Subject to the battering waves, which we hear on the soundtrack, these rocks suggest a temporality quite different from the one in which we exist, but that we intervene in nonetheless.