The protagonist in Anri Sala's film is the well-known free-jazz saxophonist Jemeel Moondoc. The musician plays his instrument "hovering" at dizzying heights in front of the window of the 18th floor of a building. The elongated building stands at his side like a second main character in this surreal scenery. It is a dreary prefabricated building in the Märkisches Viertel of Berlin, a satellite town from the 70s, which residents have given the nickname "Long Sorrow". The name became the work title for Sala's partly documentary, partly metaphorical film, but it can also be read as the title for Moondoc's musical improvisation.

In Answer Me Anri Sala explores the sound properties of a geodesic dome in West Berlin that was used as a listening station by the National Security Agency of the United States during the Cold War. Designed by the legendary American architect Buckminster Fuller, the unique, monumental architecture of this abandoned site produces a vast and lasting echo, an effect Anri Sala capitalized on to stage the breakdown of a romantic relationship. The idea was inspired by the Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni, who once wrote that he had wanted to film a couple’s breakup by capturing the silence, rather than the conversation, between a man and a woman. In Sala’s piece, a woman’s repeated plea, “Answer me,” fails to reach a man playing drums. Suggesting an impossible dialogue, the narrative framework, composed of the site’s inherent resonance, acoustic vibrations, and sound frequencies, expresses the hostile degeneration of a relationship and the fracturing of space and time.