12:03:06 EDT
TIDE LEVEL: [HIGH]
YOU ARE 2500 MILES FROM POTTERS POND, RI
Fifty years ago, a small network of scientists, artists, fishermen, and technologists began building a hidden settlement along Rhode Island’s flooded coast.
Now, in the year 2100, Kai — a teenager raised in the heavily engineered inland city of Providence — intercepts the signal of a missing robotic fish and follows it south toward Potter’s Pond, a region long presumed lost to sea level rise.
Instead, he discovers a world unfolding along the inland tide: improvised homes connected through underwater tunnels, tidal farms, floating hatcheries, communal kitchens, and strange ecological technologies embedded within the salt marsh.
As geomagnetic storms intensify across the Atlantic, Kai is drawn deeper into a distributed network of submerged communities developing new systems of communication, survival, and collective life beyond the reach of the mainland city.
The immersive film follows the life of a quahog, one of the oldest living creatures native to the Rhode Island coast, as it grows from egg to larva to adult along the seafloor.
Through this nonhuman perspective, audiences experience sea-level rise not as a scientific projection or news headline, but as a slow, embodied transformation of habitat, infrastructure, and everyday life. As decades pass, the world of TIDELANDS takes shape around it.
