To continue NOWNESS’s exciting collaboration with Sony Music Canada and the Leonard Cohen Estate, Moving On is the latest release in a project that brings together a talented host of creatives and filmmakers sharing their artistic responses to Cohen’s last posthumous album, Thanks For The Dance.

Laure Prouvost, who recently represented France at the Venice Biennale, went on a pilgrimage to Cohen’s home on the idyllic Greek island of Hydra for this latest film. Entering what Cohen once described as a “big house full of little rooms,” she explores the folk poet’s white-washed hideout where he lived, learned, and loved for almost a decade. 

Prouvost—who directed, shot and edited the film with artist and friend Ciarán Wood—uses first-person filming to give the viewer a sense that they are walking in the musician’s footsteps, across an island mostly unmarked by the passage of time, and hugged by the deep blue Aegean Sea. “The island felt timeless, floating in quietness with no cars,” says the French multimedia artist who captured the donkeys that still do some of the transportation around Hydra. “I felt in union with all that was there.” 

During the Sixties, Hydra was a little-known creative mecca for English-speaking bohemians. It was among this circle that Cohen met Marianne Ihlen, the Norwegian transplant who would go on to become his romantic partner and muse, immortalizing her in his hit song “So long, Marianne.” 

Coming full circle in this tale of love, Cohen recorded the elegiac “Moving on” with its haunting Bouzouki tremolo intro as a tribute to Ihlen after he learned of her death in 2016. “There’s a nostalgic Mediterranean romance in the music and the vocal delivery,” says Adam Cohen, the late musician’s son and producer of Thanks For The Dance. “We wanted to conjure the narrator’s memories of Hydra, and put him back in the house where he wrote “Bird On The Wire” with the ghostly presence of Marianne in the next room.” 

In quintessential Prouvost style, the artist-director alludes to this romance in her film by disassociating imagery and meaning with an idiosyncratic playfulness. “The clementine means love. The taste of its liquidity, sweet and sour, it trickles with life,” says Prouvost, who places the fruit as a central motif within her work. “The clementine is also connected with memories of my Grandma’s clementine tree where we used to pick the fresh fruit, spreading and swallowing love.”