A gay immigrants journey rolls in with “High Tide”

An immigrant’s tale set in the gay hub of Provincetown, “High Tide” salutes and illustrates cultural diversity.

Here on a visitor’s visa, Lourenço (Brazil’s Marco Pigossi) cleans rooms, sleeps in a longtime resident’s small cabin and mourns the boyfriend who dumped him.

As Lourenço comes to terms with his queerness, the “Tide” story mirrors Pigossi’s.

“I needed to talk about being gay in a very conservative country through my work as an actor. I was doing a doc in Brazil but needed to talk to it in my acting,” Pigossi, 35, said in a joint Zoom interview with another Marco, Calvani, the film’s Italian writer-director who is now his husband.

“I was in Ptown and wrote it there,” the filmmaker, 45, said, “feeding it with the community, the place. I was also dealing with specific questions about being a queer man in a foreign country.”

“What I love about this film is it’s this slice of life,” Pigossi noted. “This is the moment where Lourenço is about to embrace himself as a gay man in the world. He doesn’t know what’s going to happen, only that he can’t go back.”

“High Tide” changes gears when several disappointments give Lourenço a full-blown nervous breakdown.

“We wanted to suggest a suicidal impulse as a way of rebirth. He went through abandonment, betrayal, an abusive boss – it all combined to make a breakdown,” Calvani said.

“We see him so quiet, almost ashamed to express his own feelings and now they only come out in an irrational way. He blames himself, carries a lot of guilt and the only way out is to feel he has to kill something.”

The film, Calvani believes, is a monument to indie filmmaking in Ptown. “We shot it in 17 days with more love than money.

“To do that you need a lot of friends and you need the town to be part of it. We couldn’t make this the way we made it unless Ptown was behind it with houses, clubs, docks, costumes. They really participated.

“The town is so small, the streets are narrow — and we had big trucks with places for the crew for weeks. So it was a challenge.

“We’ll be the first crew ever allowed to shoot in the marshes which is protected national seashore.”

As for the sex scenes – and there are many — “I like to push the boundaries. But you have to have an intimacy coordinator now. I wanted my actors, even if one is my husband, to feel comfortable and safe. Every time there was a scene there was a little discussion.”

“High Tide” is in theaters