Helen's Blog /

The Anchorage directed by Swede Anders Edstrom and American CW Winter, is a sort of minimalist half installation/ half-documentary about primitive Swedish life in the woods. With a Bergman a pace, it follows Ulla, Anders' real-life mother, as she conducts her daily life on a wild island on the Stockholm archipelago.

The Anchorage

We see her taking quick dips in the buff in the ocean, reading, catching and cleaning fish and mooning about in her wooden ecological abode.

Her monotonous, yet in harmony-with-nature existence is interrupted only by a visit from her daughter and a friend, after which her lonely life is threatened by a deer hunter.

"Life has nothing to do with dramatic progression but is instead a long and continuous movement made up of an infinity of micro movements. In 1921, a young Jean Epstein issued a call-to-arms for a narrative cinema in which image would at last overturn its submission to text. The Anchorage is a film made in this spirit. It's a film that values continuous movement over predestination. It's a consideration of the wide-open potential of a narrative cinema that is freed from the constraints of denouement. The film is made as a surrendering to grace - as a set of distinctions between realism and actuality. It's a film about the passage of time, both in life and in movies themselves. It's a film about listening and seeing." (C. W. Winter, Anders Edström)

C. W. Winter / Anders Edström

C. W. Winter was born and lives in Los Angeles. He studied at the California Institute of the Arts. The Anchorage is his first feature film. He is the publisher and editor of the art and music journal The Colonial.

Anders Edström was born in Sweden and currently lives in Tokyo. As a photographer, he has published two books. He has collaborated with Purple magazine and his work has been exhibited at such venues as the Centre Pompidou in Paris.