Tale of the Tides

A multi award-winning film from Mark Deeble and Victoria Stone, narrated by Ian Holm. This is the extraordinary story of Nature’s battle for the shore seen through the eyes of Africa’s least-known animals. In Africa, a fable explains the creation of the tides. Their daily rhythm ensures that all the shore’s animals can visit to feed, but none can stay very long. The film follows the fortunes of a cast of animals that use the shore, over a cycle of the tides. It is set on the remote storm beaches and in the mangrove forests of northern Kenya. As the tide falls, a hyaena feeds on a shark, a caracal hunts monkeys and an octopus strands itself to catch crabs. Crabs are the currency, and everybody eats them from giant monitor lizards, to predatory grouper, crab plovers and mudskippers. As the tide comes in, giant whale sharks enter the mangroves to feed, moray eels fight with octopus, and predatory snappers and squid hunt in the drowned forest. The fable explains that in return for their place on the shore, crabs must pay a price and in the climax, a storm wrecks millions of swimming crabs. They are a sacrifice to the gods and a feast for all the other animals.