For nearly 250 years, a small community has occupied Tangier Island, sitting in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay. In the last century and a half, roughly two-thirds of it has disappeared. A fact like that could easily turn David Usui’s “Been Here Stay Here” into the kind of climate-change documentary that arrives with its argument already laminated: experts, charts, underwater projections, maybe a closing title card meant to make everyone feel terrible on cue. Usui, however, does something quieter, and to my mind, more difficult. He lets the island breathe before asking us to think about its possible disappearance.
That patience from a filmmaker employing an unadorned vérité approach gives the film its pull. “Been Here Stay Here” does not enter Tangier as a problem to be solved, but as a place people still wake up in, work in, worship in, joke in, raise children in, and stubbornly love.
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A Place Before It Becomes a Warning
Usui follows the quotidian rhythms of daily life on the island: men crabbing and fishing, children playing near the water, tourists arriving for a quick look around, churchgoers gathering in prayer, elders speaking of a home that has shaped families for generations. Early on, tour guide Michelle tells visitors that Tangier sits only a few feet above sea level (five feet!), and the film does not need to underline the point. The water is everywhere already. It is neighbor, livelihood, threat, memory, and clock, all at once.
This is where the documentary becomes more interesting than a standard environmental plea. Sure, one can read it as a climate-change film; but I found myself responding to it more as a film about collective identity. Tangier’s residents are bound by work, family, memory, and a religiosity so deeply embedded in the island’s culture that pulling faith away from civic life would feel artificial. Indeed, the film doesn’t treat their belief as a charming regional oddity or as some obstacle that needs correcting. It is simply the language through which many of them understand endurance.
The imagery has a weathered, tactile beauty, too. Crab shanties, docks, church interiors, old footage, and wind-battered stretches of land are photographed with a lived-in quality that feels rustic without becoming quaint. Usui and cinematographer Peter Steusloff are not chasing postcard prettiness. Here, they pay more interest in surfaces: mud, wood, water, skin, labor, habit. The archival footage adds another depth, showing a version of the island that now feels both recent and unreachable, as if memory itself were being pulled into the tide.
Faith, Erosion, and the Trouble With Staying
Of course, the same restraint that makes “Been Here Stay Here” so absorbing may also test some viewers. There were moments when I wanted the film to push a little harder, to let the mess of policy, funding, climate skepticism, and local frustration rub against the images more sharply. Usui commits so much to listening that the film sometimes drifts when it might have pressed. A few church passages also run long, especially if one is outside that world, and the observational patience can begin to feel like it is circling the same emotional ground.
David Usui’s patient documentary looks at Tangier Island not as a symbol to be argued over, but as a home shaped by faith, memory, work, and the stubborn human need to remain.
But I also think that is part of the gamble. A louder version of this film would have been easier to process and easier to dismiss. This one, on the other hand, asks us to sit with people who do not always use the vocabulary outsiders want them to use. For many on Tangier, the issue is not framed first through climate politics. It is, instead, framed through home, duty, God, family, and the simple fact of having been there for so long that leaving sounds less like relocation than erasure.
Ultimately, it works. “Been Here Stay Here” isn’t asking us to pity Tangier Island. It’s asking us to look at it long enough to understand why people would fight for a place even as it vanishes beneath them.
On paper, that may sound irrational. But on screen, it looks painfully human.
David Usui’s “Been Here Stay Here” opens in New York theatres on May 15, 2026 at Quad Cinema. It will next show at Laemmle Theatres in Los Angeles on May 27, 2026, both courtesy of Grasshopper Film. Follow us for more coverage.
