Between Moon Tides
2025 · 25m · United States
Directed by Jason Jaacks
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative, tender
As sea-level rise drowns their marsh habitat, Deirdre Robinson and a team of citizen scientists build DIY 'arks' to lift saltmarsh sparrow nests above the tides.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects climate docs to be either doom-scroll or sentimental, but Jaacks does something weirder—he lets the sparrows and the citizens be equally strange, equally heroic, equally absurd. It's a documentary that refuses to feel like a sermon.
The film positions itself thoughtfully within the lineage of nature documentation and citizen science cinema, with a restrained aesthetic that honors both the ecological subject and the human labor at its center; the edit rhythm matches the tidal patience required.
The decision to let the DIY 'arks'—these almost crude, handmade structures—remain visually central rather than cut away to prettier establishing shots transforms what could be a treacly story into something about ingenuity under constraint.