Low Tide at Six: A Director's Statement

Low Tide at Six began with a timetable. I was staying with a friend on the coast in the north, and pinned to her fridge was a printed sheet of tide times for the month, with certain mornings circled in red. I asked her about it. She said her neighbour picked cockles on the flats and the circled mornings were the ones when the tide was low enough, early enough, for him to work before his other job. I asked if I could go with him. He said I could, as long as I did not talk.

I went out with him the next week, and then the week after that, and by the end of the month I knew I wanted to make a film about those mornings. Not about him, exactly, and not about shellfish. About the rhythm of a working life that is set not by a clock or a boss but by the moon.

We filmed for eleven months, from one October to the next. The crew was two people: me on camera and Ruaridh Bain on sound. We went out on every circled morning we could manage, which in the end was sixty-three. We had no lights and no permits beyond a letter from the estuary trust, and we did not stage anything. The pickers let us follow them on condition that we never got between them and the water.

The film has almost no dialogue. That was not a principle when we started. It is simply what happened. People who work the flats do not talk much while they are out there. They are listening: to the water, to the birds, to the sound the sand makes when the tide is on the turn. After the first few weeks we stopped trying to get them to explain what they were doing and started listening with them. The sound in the film is the real sound of those mornings, and in many places it is doing the work that interviews would do in a different kind of documentary.

The structure is the year. There is no other plot. The film begins in autumn darkness, with headlamps moving across black mud, and it ends the following autumn in the same place, in the same dark, with the same headlamps. In between, the light changes, the birds change, the pickers change. One of them retires. One of them has a baby and comes back to the flats four months later. The tide does not change at all. It goes out and comes back twice a day, and everybody plans their lives around it.

I edited the film to the tide. That sounds like a slogan, so I should explain. I laid out all sixty-three mornings in order and, for each one, I used only footage from the period between the moment the pickers set out and the moment the water turned. Nothing from before, nothing from after. That meant every sequence in the film has a natural end that nobody chose. When the water comes, the scene is over.

The title refers to the first morning I went out, when low tide was at six exactly and my friend's neighbour said, as we walked out onto the flats in the dark, that this was the best hour of the day and that nobody he knew had ever seen it. I hope the film lets a few more people see it.

Low Tide at Six is in the films archive. It runs for twenty-four minutes and is best watched with headphones.