Leonard Cohen's elegiac tribute to lost love, captured in Greece

Collaborating with the Leonard Cohen Legacy, NOWNESS presents a beautifully melancholic film celebrating Cohen's lost love. The partnership between NOWNESS, Sony Music Canada and The Legacy of Leonard Cohen has resulted in a number of remarkable artworks by acclaimed filmmakers in the past year, inspired by Cohen's posthumous album Thanks For The Dance. Today, the latest beautifully melancholy movie was unveiled, which interprets the musician's song "Moving On".

The film's director Laura Privost, a Turner Prize winner, traveled to the island of Chidra in Greece, where Cohen's hideout was located, to create the movie. In the 1960s, Chidra was a bohemian mecca of sorts, attracting artists with its idyllic''shores. It was here that Cohen met his lover and muse Marianne Ilene, sparking a romantic idyll that inspired much of his work, including several songs on his first two albums, Songs of Leonard Cohen (1967) and Songs from a Room (1969). In the cover photo of the latter album, Marianne can be seen wrapped in a towel in their Greek home. Marianne is also said to have played a role in the creation of one of Cohen's most famous songs, "Bird on the Wire." One day in Greece, she saw a small bird sitting on a newly built power line and noticed that it looked like musical notes, suggesting that Cohen write a song based on this theme. It was Marianne who became the heroine of the song 'Moving On', a sad and melodic song written some 50 years after their''first meeting.

The movie Privost is a visual elegy to the song 'Moving On', which follows Cohen's journey through idyllic Hydra and captures the folk-poet's refuge with its unchanging, sunny surroundings. "The island seemed eternal, floating in silence without cars," says the French artist. "I felt at one with everything that was there." Adam Cohen, Leonard Cohen's son and producer of the album "Thanks For The Dance," notes that there's a nostalgic Mediterranean romanticism in the music and vocal delivery. They wanted to recreate the main character's memories of Heard and put him back in the house where he wrote 'Bird On The Wire', with the presence of a ghostly''Marianne's presence in the next room. This ghostly presence is felt in Privost's dreamy, first-person film, evoking romance, memory and loss with glimpses of fruit, sea, sun and empty white rooms in a house on Hydra while Cohen's soulful, husky voice plays over the futtage. "Clementine means love. The taste of her liquid, sweet and sour, she is alive, flowing with life," Privost explains of the film's playful motif. "Clementine also evokes memories of my grandmother's Clementine tree where we used to pick fresh fruit, spreading and ingesting love." Watch the movie below.