Sometimes it takes an artist who’s an outsider to truly see a particular place, whether it’s the isolation of Ang Lee’s “Brokeback Mountain,” the darkness of Los Angeles in Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown” or anything by Billy Wilder.
Add to that list Italian writer-director Marco Calvani who manages to capture Provincetown’s duality of freedom and yearning in his debut feature “High Tide.” The film stars Calvani’s husband, Brazilian actor Marco Pigossi, as undocumented Brazilian immigrant Lourenço, who’s searching for love, purpose and a place to call home in Provincetown.
Shot in Provincetown over 17 days in the fall of 2022, Calvani in June accompanied his film to the Provincetown International Film Festival. The film will be released theatrically this fall from Strand Releasing.
“I found Provincetown but Provincetown found me,” says Calvani from Los Angeles, where he lives with Pigossi. An accomplished actor, playwright and stage director in Italy, Calvani moved to New York City in 2013 and had several of his plays produced.
But 2013 was a very different, more hopeful era, he says. By the time the COVID pandemic hit in 2020, Calvani was questioning his sense of belonging. “I felt the past didn’t matter and that I had no future, professionally. As an immigrant to this country, I did not know what to do with myself; I didn’t have a place to go back to, no family anymore, I didn’t know what to expect.”
Friends in Provincetown invited him in June 2020 to take refuge in a guesthouse at the end of their property, and he ended up staying six months. “I found a sense of place and home that I could not find around me any more in New York or in this country at large but also within me. At the same time, I met other people, other immigrants and other Americans who were feeling the same way,” says Calvani. “Everyone who ends up there—artists, pilgrims, queers—there’s a lot of sadness in searching for a place to belong. As a queer man, I wasn’t alone but also in this moment of displacement, I found a place.”
After his visit, Calvani began writing what became “High Tide.”
“I never made a feature. Only short films,” he says. “I was writing out of a deep need to find myself again, and I could only do it through my writing, through making art.”
In September 2020, while visiting Los Angeles, he met Pigossi, an actor famous in his native Brazil who came to LA “for pilot season then was stuck here because of the pandemic. So he was in the same kind of limbo,” says Calvani. “We fell in love, and our love ended up informing the script.”
Only after they moved in together did Calvani show Pigossi his first draft. “Two years later, when we got into production, that film was ours because we both knew the backstory for Lourenço. I wrote it but he lived it. The film was part of his experience by then.”
Besides casting well-known actors Bill Irwin and Bryan Batt, Calvani’s friend and collaborator Marisa Tomei appears as Miriam, an artist who befriends Lourenço. Calvani and Tomei have known each other since 2016 when he served as dramaturg and she starred in Tennessee Williams’ “The Rose Tattoo,” first at the Williamstown Theater Festival and then, three years later, on Broadway.
“It made sense to ask her to be Miriam,” says Calvani. “It’s such a small role, she could have said no, but she said yes, and that was helpful in getting money,” says Calvani. “It was a gift from her; she brings light and warmth to even just a few scenes on screen.”
Calvani and producer Pete Shilaimon spent two and one-half months in Provincetown before shooting. “We realized the only way to make the film was to involve the community, to explain what the movie was about and why it was important to us,” Calvani says. They were able to film at recognizable locations around town including the A-House, the Red Inn, the Crown and Anchor, and Provincetown Brewery, among others.
Then there are the breathtaking scenes of empty beaches and marshes that capture the town’s unique post-summer solitude and loneliness. “I had a great cinematographer in Oscar Ignacio Jiménez. My dream was to shoot on film, but it was too much to shoot on film in the marsh. I knew exactly what I wanted. I lived everything,” Calvani says. “I was there every day, walking the marsh, so I knew exactly where to put the camera. I experienced the place with my own eyes and body. I knew just when the light is on the grass, how it looks. It is so magical.”
Not a subscriber? Sign up today for a free subscription to Boston Spirit magazine, New England’s premier LGBT magazine. We will send you a copy of Boston Spirit 6 times per year and we never sell/rent our subscriber information. Click HERE to sign up!
