‘High Tide’ Director and Star Fell in Love While Making Queer Romance

In director and writer Marco Calvani’s “High Tide,” well-known Brazilian actor Marco Pigossi stars as Lourenco, an immigrant living in Provincetown, the iconic gay getaway in Massachusetts. Suddenly single with his visa about to expire, he meets and falls for Maurice (James Bland), a Black doctor from New York City who is on vacation before heading to Angola for a residency.

Turns out there was as much romance going on off-screen as there was on. Calvani and Pigossi fell in love after initially meeting to talk about possibly working together one day.

“I tell everyone there’s a love story behind the love story.” Pigossi tells me. “We were falling in love as he was finishing the script. He was always asking me things like, ‘What’s your favorite poem in Brazil? What would be like a very conservative city in the countryside?’ I didn’t know what he was writing. I wasn’t thinking about this script at all. Then we moved in together like very good lesbians after a month, and he hands me the script. The poem I told him about was at the beginning of the script. I started crying immediately and he was like, ‘I wrote this for you. I was falling in love with you while I was falling in love with the character.’ It’s crazy.”

“High Tide” became their “baby,” Pigossi says. “It’s our first baby together. This is his first feature film. Even though I had a career in Brazil, it didn’t necessarily translate to the U.S., but we decided we were going to get this done.”

It took about two years to fund the movie, which was shot on location in Provincetown. Rounding out the cast are Bill Irwin, Marisa Tomei, Bryan Batt, Mya Taylor, Sean Mahon, Chelsea Cook and Tom Flaherty.

“When you talk about Provincetown, it is this beautiful queer mecca where everybody is welcome, but there are different experiences for different people, because in our community, we’re so different in every possible way,” Pigossi says. “This film is a celebration of intimacy, and that’s something that we don’t have much of anymore. Especially in our community, we’re so connected to a screen where you have so much information about Asking person. Sometimes you can miss the opportunity to meet someone amazing because there’s no getting to know someone.”

As election day draws near, Pigossi hope the film’s themes around race, immigration and queer love help “open some hearts.” “I want people to think about what does it mean to be a Black man in America today, what is it to be in an interracial relationship in a very white place,” he says. “There are so many beauties and topics that Lourenzo goes through that I want to touch people’s hearts and create empathy.”

Calvani and Pigossi married in August in Calvani’s native Italy. They got engaged just hours after the film wrapped when Calvani proposed over dinner at Sal’s, one of Provincetown’s most popular restaurants. “We were on the beach,” Pigossi recalls. “Marco said, ‘This is the place where we decided to make a life together. This is the place where we decided to move in together. This is the place where we just wrapped. So, this is the place where I am going to ask you to marry me.’”