Jennifer Baichwal, director and producer of Let It Come Down: The Life of Paul Bowles, was an avid reader of Paul Bowles as a teenager. An ex-pat American composer and writer, Bowles has lived in Morocco for over 50 years. He is known as a writer’s writer, a friend of Gertrude Stein and Aaron Copeland, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote and Gore Vidal. Later in his forties, he was a mentor of William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg.

Although known to be gay, Bowles had an open marriage with writer Jane Bowles, who was also gay. The two attracted many writers and artists to visit them in Morocco.

One of those artists was Baichwal, who ran away to Morocco in her early twenties to meet Bowles. It was this early obsession with the writer/composer that led her to this production, now nominated for a 1999 Rockie Award.

When Baichwal and husband Nick de Pencier, producer/dop on Let It Come Down, heard that Bowles was ill, they made a trip to Morocco with two Hi-8 cameras to shoot the doc. The film, produced through their Toronto company Requisite Productions, was entirely self-financed from the get go and was a five-year labor of love coproduced with the Banff Centre for the Arts.

De Pencier and Baichwal received considerable support from Rhombus Media in Toronto, which loaned them its Avid to edit the film. ‘They gave us a lot of advice and help,’ says de Pencier. Rhombus is Requisite’s international distributor.

One of the central scenes in the film captures Bowles on a return visit to New York after a 40-year absence. A festival of music honoring his early days as a composer was taking place at the Lincoln Center and Bowles welcomed the two filmmakers into his inner circle of friends.

They captured Bowles reminiscing with Burroughs and Ginsberg over lunch at his hotel. It was the last time they were all together; Burroughs and Ginsberg died shortly after the reunion.

There are two versions of Let It Come Down; one for television which aired on tvontario and a 75-minute version which screened at the Toronto International Film Festival in 1998. The doc has had a theatrical release in Canada and has played in Toronto, Victoria and Vancouver. In the u.s., it is distributed by Zeitgeist. Recently, it received a Hot Docs award for best biographical documentary and was nominated for a 1999 Genie for best feature-length doc.

Let It Come Down will be at Banff looking for regional and European sales, and a Canadian second window. The film has already sold in Denmark, Greece and Japan.

De Pencier has worked as a dop on many dance films. Baichwal’s first doc was Looking You In The Back of the Head for tvo’s From the Heart. The two are now at work on another documentary, Unlikely Pilgrimmage. The film was shot on location in India last October and will air on tvo’s The View From Here.

Unlikely Pilgrimmage follows Baichwal and her brother and two sisters as they return to India to take their father’s ashes to the source of the Ganges River, one of the holiest rivers in India.