Music | Film

DIY auteur and consummate independent filmmaker Jem Cohen (Museum Hours, Instrument, Benjamin Smoke) collaborates with a supergroup of acclaimed musicians— Guy Picciotto (Fugazi), Jim White (Dirty Three), T. Griffin (The Quavers), Efrim Manuel Menuck and Sophie Trudeau (Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Thee Silver Mt. Zion), and Jessica Moss (Thee Silver Mt. Zion), plus guest vocalist Mira Billotte (White Magic)—in this cinematic love letter to Nova Scotia’s Cape Breton.

Multiple layered film projections are interspersed with texts, ranging from poems to local folklore, and buoyed by the group’s alternately ethereal and epic original score. Shot over the course of a decade, We Have An Anchor—which was originally commissioned by the Experimental Media & Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) in Troy, NY, and premiered there last year—is an elegiac record of a place suspended in time, attuned to the icy fields, wind-whipped grasses, and lulling surf that mark this extraordinary landscape.