The Tide Keeper

Alyx Duncan's short film stars her father, conservationist Lee Stuart, who featured in her experimental feature The Red House. The Tide Keeper is a lament for an ailing ecosystem; Stuart plays a man who keeps watch over his stretch of coastline, recording tide levels and picking up waste cluttering the beach. At night he dreams of his own demise, as the same throwaway items constrain and choke him. The film creates a mystical world through its intricate puppetry, and Francesca Mountjoy's melancholic music. The Tide Keeper won Best Film awards at the NZ International Film Festival and Show Me Shorts. 

The Tide Keeper is concise, intelligent, beautiful and moving. This film created another world within a world, incorporating an intriguing sense of choreographic movement and the best elements of story-telling and cinema. It is totally original.

– The 2015 Show Me Shorts judging team on The Tide Keeper

Key Cast & Crew

Francesca Mountford

Composer

Leda Farrow

Puppet Design, Puppeteer

Chris Pryor

Cinematographer

Ben Montgomery

Cinematographer

Lee Stuart

As: Old man

Alyx Duncan

Director, Writer, Producer, Puppeteer