Tangier Island is disappearing. Its shoreline has been eroding for decades, but rising sea levels now threaten to submerge the Chesapeake Bay site completely. Some scientists have predicted it will be uninhabitable in a matter of decades. Its population has dwindled to a few hundred and continues to decline.
Yet this tight-knit Virginia community is distinctive, in part, for its high percentage of residents who do not believe that climate change is caused by humans, or perhaps that it is real at all. (In the 2024 national elections, the island showed strong support for former President Trump — 88 percent of votes cast.) That complicated dynamic is the focus of David Usui’s new documentary, “Been Here Stay Here” (in theaters), a lyrical, empathetic, elegiac portrait of the island and its inhabitants, who are watching their homes slip away and calling out to God to save them.
The film unfolds slowly as a series of vignettes. We pull up to the island with a tour boat as a guide explains various facts to the passengers. Tangier has two churches (one Methodist, one nondenominational) and one school. It’s only a few feet above sea level, and a couple of miles wide and long. The men of the island are mostly “watermen” — they fish and crab and work on boats. As the filmmakers spend time there, a picture develops of a devout community of mostly lifelong residents whose families have been there for many generations, and who are watching their land disappear before their eyes. “Man is not causing the climate to change,” one old-timer tells a visitor. “We can’t do anything about it.”
“Been Here Stay Here” is less about the mechanics of climate change or the politics around it than the quiet mental and emotional forces that shape a group of people. We watch children talking about having to “build a big wall” as they play on the beach or describing the weather in intimate terms as they bike around the island. We follow a young boy learning his family’s fishing trade on the water and wonder if he’ll be able to pursue the same livelihood. Old men question whether the island will exist for their grandchildren, and old women in church describe their blessings and express their faith that God will save their homes. One islander, now at college, tries to explain his upbringing to new friends around a bonfire at school.
Scientists appear on the island and in a classroom to talk about the realities of what’s happening to Tangier Island, and some of the reasons that measures like building an extensive sea wall haven’t been taken. But this is not a didactic film. It is almost hypnotic. Periodically, Usui weaves together shots of the waves with meditative words from residents in their hard-to-describe dialect. Most say they’re waiting for God to save them or share parables from the Bible. “All of us are expecting something to happen immediately,” a man’s voice says. “But yet, the Lord works in His own time.”
Time is slipping away for Tangier Island, just like its shoreline. “Been Here Stay Here” beautifully captures what it is right now, then asks us to consider what will probably be lost soon.
