Described by Gilliam as Alice in Wonderland meets Psycho, Tideland is a story that explores the resilience of a child and how she survives in bizarre circumstances. Jeliza-Rose is a young child in a very unusual situation - both parents are junkies. When her mother dies, she embarks on a strange journey with her father, Noah, a rock’n roll musician well past his time. Drifting between reality and fantasy, Jeliza-Rose escapes the vast loneliness of her new home into the fantasy world that exists in her imagination.

In this world fireflies have names, bog-men awaken at dusk, and squirrels talk. The heads of four dolls, long since separated from their bodies, keep her company, until she meets Dickens, a mentally damaged young man with the mind of a ten-year-old. Dressed in a wet suit and speedo, he spends his days hiding in a junk heaped wig-wam turned submarine, waiting to catch the monster shark that inhabits the railway tracks. Then there’s his older sister Dell, a tall ghost-like figure dressed in black who hides behind a beekeeper’s mesh hood. Tideland is as optimistic as it is surreal, as humorous as it is suspenseful and as disturbing as it is beautiful.