Quite close to London, but a million miles away, Southend-on-Sea is a town along the Thames estuary. I was invited by an arts group there to make a portrait of the region. The film is of everyday streets, weathers, birds, and of course, water, mud, and sky. It is also of people. I made a series of almost random interviews with locals—not my usual approach for a landscape or city film—but I became fascinated by the musicality of the speech, the depths and specificity of knowledge, the odd revelations. Are these people fully representative of the area? Not at all. As is usual in my work, I embraced the chance encounter and rejected the very idea of the definitive. What I discovered is that the estuary and its insistent tides brought in not only nature and history, but prize-winning Indian curries, an encyclopedic universe of hats, and a nearly lost world of proto-punk music. – Jem Cohen