We Have an Anchor: Mary Margaret O’Hara, Fugazi, Godspeed, Dirty Three members join Jem Cohen

A celebrated and inventive filmmaker based in Brooklyn, New York, Jem Cohen is somewhat infatuated with Nova Scotia's Cape Breton Island.

“It is astonishingly beautiful,” he says breathlessly over the phone. “When I first went there over 10 years ago, I immediately felt it was perhaps as beautiful as any place I’d ever been. It felt a lot like certain outer reaches of Scotland to me, which it turns out is no accident, geologically speaking.

“So it cast a spell because it had this wild beauty but, as I got to know it better, I of course realized that there was a lot beyond the postcard aspect of Nova Scotia. It is indeed a fascinating, complicated and, in some ways, troubled place and all of those layers began to interest me and I thought I’d like to take them on in some way.”

Indeed, Cohen has captured the island with We Have an Anchor, a hybrid concert/cinematic experience that is taking place for only the second time ever on Dec. 4 and 5 at the TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto, co-presented by the Images Festival and the Toronto International Film Festival. The hybrid nature of the event includes filmed images of landscapes and documentary-style interviews presented in a triptych while a live band plays its soundtrack. And my God, what a band.

Cohen’s We Are an Anchor ensemble features Fugazi’s Guy Picciotto, Dirty Three’s Jim White, Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s Efrim Menuck and Sophie Trudeau, Silver Mt. Zion’s Jessica Moss, the Quavers’ T. Griffin and special guest Mary Margaret O’Hara. This all-star squad first got together after the project was commissioned by EMPAC in upstate New York and performed earlier this year.

“We had a couple of long days of rehearsal so we could set some stuff in stone,” Menuck explains, referring to a trek that he and the core band made to a snowbound cabin in Cape Breton this past January. “A lot of it is improvised but with clear parameters. I hope it works out. It seemed to last time.”

“Jem and I have done a bunch of these things where we do film and music live and this one is really beautiful,” says Picciotto. Though O'Hara wasn't present at the initial show, he's subsequently worked on recording projects with the legendary singer and is eager to collaborate with her again in Toronto. “She’s amazingly talented and really sweet.”

Over the years, Cohen has created background films for live Godspeed shows, commissioned Griffin to write soundtracks for his films and, perhaps most famously, collaborated with Fugazi over a 10-year arc, co-creating the documentary film Instrument.

“These are all people I had worked with before, except for Jim White, who I’d been listening to and watching for many years and feeling like he was one of the musicians in the universe that I most wanted to do something with,” Cohen explains. “So, it was very exciting to bring them all together in a room and have them apply themselves in ways that are similar to what we’ve done before and some that are quite different.”

Beyond these Toronto shows, Cohen will soon begin promoting a recently completed feature film, Museum Hours, which has already made the rounds at festivals like TIFF.

“Mary Margaret O’Hara is one of the co-stars and she’s a remarkable actress,” he enthuses. “People who know her already know that she’s a remarkable musician and singer but she’s also a very special screen presence. I’m just thrilled to have it enter the world. It’s loosely about a guard in a big old art museum in Vienna, but it encompasses a lot of other things.

“I’m always trying to combine different genres and forces into some weird hybrid,” Cohen admits. “We Have an Anchor is one direction and Museum Hours is another. It’s good to have both going in the same year.”

To hear this conversation with Jem Cohen, you can download an MP3 if you right-click this highlighted text and “Save target as.” Or to stream it, press play.

See We Have an Anchor on Dec. 4 and 5 at the TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto.