Director/writer: Jennifer Baichwal – Producers: Jennifer Baichwal, Nick de Pencier – Cameraman: Jim Allodi – Diary by: Louise Cameron

Jennifer Baichwal has had a 16-year, on-again-off-again relationship with reclusive writer and composer Paul Bowles. The friendship, which began with her teenage passion for Bowles’ sinister evocations of Morocco, will culminate at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival with the premiere of Let It Come Down, a film biography of Bowles’ life.

‘My whole point in doing this,’ says Baichwal, ‘was to try to do a definitive film biography about someone with whom you could not do anything traditional, who escaped all the categories with which you would usually approach the problem of biography.’

Baichwal and her coproducer Nick de Pencier have worked intermittently on the project over five years, relying almost entirely on their own financial resources and the auspices of friends. The film had no budget to speak of, and, when the well ran dry, the project would go into hiatus.

1982: Nineteen-year-old Jennifer Baichwal runs away to Morocco, where she lives on a farm outside Tangier and becomes friends with Paul Bowles.

1993: Baichwal, now living in Montreal, begins work on her first film, a one-hour documentary called Looking You in the Back of the Head, which is funded by the National Film Board, sodec and an explorations grant from the Canada Council.

January 1994: After viewing several ineffectual tv documentaries on Bowles’ career, Baichwal writes to him, asking if he remembers her and requesting an interview. Bowles invites her to visit him in Tangier.

July 1994: Baichwal, de Pencier, associate producer and sound recordist Denise Holloway and Baichwal’s school friend Evan Solomon drive from Paris to Tangier with two Hi-8 cameras packed into their tiny car. They have no budget and all costs are deferred.

Baichwal has not heard from Bowles since January, so the group arrives in Tangier without knowing whether the author will still agree to the interview, or even if he will be there.

It turns out that Bowles is happy to see them, and willing to participate in the shoot. As well as interviewing Bowles, they talk to many of the older people who knew him at the zenith of Tangier’s decadent period.

(Solomon, who had introduced Baichwal to de Pencier, insisted on being included in the trip despite his lack of technical experience. ‘He was a totally overqualified boom operator,’ Baichwal remembers. ‘He would get bored in the middle of an interview and you could see the boom creeping down. We had terrible trouble at post because of his boredom.’)

August 1994 to August 1995: Baichwal and de Pencier return to Canada and, as they have exhausted their meager funds, work on the film comes to a halt.

Baichwal moves to Toronto and takes a job as a critic for CBC Newsworld’s On the Arts. She continues to edit Looking You in the Back of the Head, which is eventually sold to tvontario.

September 1995: The Lincoln Center holds a music festival in honor of Bowles. He makes his first trip to New York in 35 years. Baichwal and de Pencier film 25 hours of interviews with him over six days. Lying on his hotel bed, Bowles talks candidly about his wife, his feelings about his homosexuality, his relation to the Beat writers, and the lack of attention his work has received from American critics.

While Baichwal and de Pencier are filming, William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg visit Bowles. ‘It was just such a fluke,’ recalls Baichwal. ‘They forgot about the camera most of the time, so it was just these three old guys chatting. It turned out to be the last time they saw each other so, in retrospect, it was historic.’

November 1995: Baichwal and de Pencier fly to Kansas to hold further interviews with Burroughs.

January 1996: Still without funding in place, Baichwal and de Pencier, along with cinematographer Jim Allodi, make a second trip to Morocco. They interview David Herbert, cousin to the Queen, and a central figure in the expatriate community which gravitated towards Paul and Jane Bowles in the 1940s and ’50s.

June 1996: Sheena Macdonald and Daniel Iron at Rhombus International agree to distribute Let It Come Down. Iron gives Baichwal and de Pencier free legal advice, and Macdonald helps them in the search for a sales deal. With an Avid and studio space on loan from Rhombus, editor David Wharnsby and associate editor Roland Schlimme begin working on Let It Come Down.

Baichwal attributes some of the difficulties in securing funding to the content of the project: ‘It’s partly because we don’t have much of a track record,’ she says, ‘but I think it is also this whole issue of a Canadian cultural mandate. We are a completely Canadian outfit that is making a film about an American.’

June 1998: The filmmakers finish their post-production with the aid of a grant from the Banff Center. In Banff, Luke Van Dyk is the online editor and Paul Herspiegel is the sound editor.

All of the music in the film is either composed by Bowles or selected from the archive of Moroccan traditional music which he collected for the Library of Congress.

Bowles has given the filmmakers access to all of his papers, his writing and music. The Allen Ginsberg Trust lets them use photographs from their collection for a negligible fee, and Jeremy Thomas, producer of the film version of The Sheltering Sky, gives them a clip from the film free of charge.

September 1998: Let It Come Down screens at the Toronto International Film Festival. Also playing at the festival is a short called Cold Feet made by de Pencier and Allodi.

Public screenings:

Thursday, Sept. 17, 9 p.m.

Cumberland 3

Saturday, Sept. 19, 3 p.m.

Cumberland/Alliance 4

Press & industry screenings:

See Website for daily updates: www.bell.ca/filmfest