Abigail Child

A profoundly working-class community with an intense connection to its land and water is transformed into a pleasure paradise for the wealthy…all while the ground slips into the sea. A feature documentary, PRECIPICE focuses on the intersection between climate change and a changing shore community’s response to this global emergency.

It’s been decades since fishing, the engine of Nova Scotia’s last 200 years, collapsed. The result: numerous jobs dried up for independent offshore fishermen. A gold rush on the land fills the vacuum, a double-edged sword of economic activity and environmental deterioration.

PRECIPICE documents these challenges and how community members work to mitigate the human impact: building back the eroding drumlins, creating oyster farms in local bays, practicing regenerative farming, woodlot conservation and organizing the community to buy land to preserve extant wetlands.

The film brings a necessary female perspective (and humor) to this research, asking: How subjectivities and nationalities shape our imaginings of an “appropriate” mechanical companion? Why are Siri and Alexa ‘fitted’ with female voices?

Film Festivals

Local Canadian Maritime Preview of Abigail Child’s PRECIPICE (2025) Fri, September 19, 2025, 2:30pm at Lunenburg Doc Festival

Reviews

"On Nova Scotia’s South Shore, where fishing once shaped the communities, new pressures are shifting the landscape. Precipice points the lens at Rose Bay, and up river, tracing the fragile edge between memory and disappearance, as working-class lives are recast against rising seas and fancy coastal development. Echoes of old home movies, Mi’kmaq tales and present-day restoration (including oyster farming, wetland preservation, woodlot management) interweave into a portrait of resilience. The film, evoking the tone and pace of Brett Story’s The Hottest August (2019) focuses on the intersection between climate change and a community's response to this global emergency.” —Walter Forsyth [Director: Lunenburg Doc Fest]