A feature film by Elena Vale
The things we leave behind never stop following.
A town that remembers everything.
And a sea that keeps no secrets.
The logline
When a celebrated marine biologist returns to the isolated fishing town she fled fifteen years ago, the discovery of a drowned girl forces her to confront the sister she abandoned—and the night that made them strangers.
A haunting story about memory, guilt, and the impossible distance between who we were and who we have become.
Synopsis · The return
Dr. Mara Ellison has built a life studying the ocean from a safe distance. Brilliant, controlled, and newly shortlisted for the post that will define her career, she has not returned to Greyhaven since she was nineteen.
Then her father suffers a stroke. Mara comes home intending to stay for forty-eight hours. On her first morning, the body of seventeen-year-old Liv Hart is pulled from the cove below the old lighthouse—the same water where Mara’s mother disappeared.
Synopsis · The fracture
Mara’s younger sister, Nell, now runs their father’s failing boatyard. Where Mara turned pain into achievement, Nell stayed and absorbed the weight of the family’s silence.
Liv had been working for Nell. In the days before her death, she became obsessed with local tide charts and a series of unexplained sinkings. As Mara follows Liv’s research, the sisters’ uneasy truce begins to collapse. Each clue points toward their father—and toward a stormy night neither woman remembers the same way.
Synopsis · The reckoning
With another storm moving in, Mara learns the truth: their mother did not leave them. She died trying to expose the illegal salvage operation that still owns Greyhaven’s silence.
Liv found the proof. Nell tried to protect her. Their father, desperate to save what remained of the family, helped bury both truths. In the flooded tunnels beneath the lighthouse, Mara and Nell must choose whether to preserve the story that kept them alive—or finally let it drown.
At dawn, the sisters walk out together. Not healed. But no longer alone.
The tone
The film lives in the tension between the vast and the intimate: landscapes that overwhelm, rooms that constrict, and silences that say more than dialogue ever could.
The world
A weather-beaten town at the edge of Britain. Salt-scored windows. Empty arcades. Fishing boats rusting beside expensive second homes. Beautiful from a distance; claustrophobic up close.
Visual language
Composed wides hold characters inside the landscape. Handheld movement is reserved for moments when control breaks. Faces are often seen through glass, water, and reflection—always close, never fully accessible.
Light & colour
Daylight is soft and silver, with skin tones warmed against a desaturated coast. Night arrives in deep marine blues, interrupted by sodium orange and the cold white sweep of the lighthouse.
Sound
Wind under doors. Rigging against masts. The low pulse of machinery below the harbour. The score emerges sparingly from these textures—cello, prepared piano, and breath—until the natural and the composed become indistinguishable.
Performance
Performances are naturalistic, restrained, and alive to contradiction. Emotion appears in the effort to contain it. We stay close enough to see the thought before the words.
Creative positioning
Elevated, performance-led cinema with genre tension and an emotionally resonant core.
2019 · Neon
For its elemental landscape, precise gaze, and the emotional force of what remains unsaid.
2022 · A24
For its coastal community, moral complexity, and women caught between love and truth.
2011 · Searchlight
For its subjective unease, fractured memory, and psychologically immersive storytelling.
Main character
38 · Marine biologist · The one who left
Mara has made a career from understanding systems: tides, currents, migration patterns. People are harder.
Precise, composed, and allergic to sentiment, she wears competence like armour. Her success is real, but so is the fear beneath it: that everything she has built began with an act of cowardice. Returning to Greyhaven brings Mara face to face with the one person who sees through her—the sister whose life was shaped by Mara’s escape.
From control to surrender. From witness to participant. From leaving to choosing to stay.
Casting vision
Three actors capable of carrying interiority, intelligence, and emotional danger in equal measure.
For the role of Mara Ellison
For the role of Nell Ellison
For the role of DI Helen Ward
Images are tonal references for private presentation purposes and do not imply attachment.
Director’s statement
I grew up in a coastal town where the sea was both livelihood and threat. Everyone knew everyone’s story—or believed they did.
Years later, what stayed with me was not the gossip, but the silence beneath it: the family secrets protected out of love until that protection became its own kind of harm. A Tide Between Us began with an image of two sisters standing at opposite ends of a breakwater, unable to cross the distance between them.
I want to make a thriller where the central mystery is not simply what happened, but why the people we love make truth impossible. The landscape is not backdrop; it is memory made physical—beautiful, shifting, and powerful enough to remake the shore.
This is a film about the stories families tell to survive, and the courage it takes to outgrow them. It is, finally, a story of repair.
Writer / Director
Elena Vale is a British-Spanish filmmaker drawn to intimate stories about place, memory, and the complicated loyalties of family.
Her short film Low Water premiered at the BFI London Film Festival and was nominated for Best British Short at the British Independent Film Awards. Her follow-up, The Weather Inside, won the Grand Jury Prize at Palm Springs ShortFest and was acquired by MUBI.
A Screen International Star of Tomorrow and alumna of the TorinoFilmLab, Elena has directed commercial work for global arts and fashion clients. A Tide Between Us is her debut feature.
Financial plan
A contained, premium production designed to protect creative ambition while maximizing every pound on screen.
Production budget
Investment strategy
The structure combines private equity with non-recoupable public support and a UK tax credit, reducing the at-risk capital while preserving meaningful upside.
Investor capital is cash-flowed against contracted elements where possible, limiting the duration and scale of exposure.
Recoupment waterfall
Gross receiptsCollection account receives all worldwide revenues.
DistributionApproved distribution fees and direct expenses paid.
Equity recoupmentPrivate investors recoup 100% of capital plus 20% premium.
Net profitsRemaining proceeds split 50 / 50 between investors and producers.
The detail
The story is production-efficient: limited principal locations, a concentrated ensemble, and a 28-day shoot. The budget secures meaningful cast, experienced heads of department, and the weather cover essential to coastal production.
The project sits in a proven international space for elevated British drama, with clear appeal to streamers, specialty distributors, and audiences over 30 seeking intelligent, star-driven storytelling.
A significant tax incentive, conservative sales estimates, completion bonding, a dedicated collection account, and no producer deferrals ahead of investor recoupment.
Package cast and finance, shoot in autumn 2026, and target a major European premiere in 2027, supported by a specialist international sales agent and coordinated territory strategy.
Illustrative figures for discussion only. Final terms will be subject to legal documentation, production schedule, tax advice, and independent sales estimates.