Indie filmmaker Shandi Mitchell’s debut feature has seven main characters: six fishermen lost at sea and an unforgiving Atlantic ocean.

The Disappeared, already acquired by The Movie Network and Movie Central, is to start shooting in September off the coast of Lunenberg, Nova Scotia.

“I spoke with a 92 year-old man who had worked on the sea his entire life,” said Mitchell. “I asked him if he had ever been afraid. He answered, ‘Once. When I had been lost.’ I wondered what it could be like to be in that infinite vastness, between the shores of living and dead. Who would I be, if everything was stripped away?” she added.

The marine coordinator on the film about fishermen lost at sea on two dories is William Flower, whose seaborne credits off the coast of Nova Scotia include the mini-series Sea Wolf, and the TV dramas Moby Dick and Haven.

Mitchell served as assistant director on local Atlantic movie shoots Growing Op, Poor Boys Game and The Hanging Garden.

She also directed the the shorts Baba’s House and Tell Me.

The Disappeared is produced by Gilles Belanger, Ralph Holt, Walter Forsyth and Karen Franklin.

The project has financing from Telefilm Canada and Film Nova Scotia and development funding from Canada Council for the Arts and the Nova Scotia Department of Communities, Culture and Heritage.