JOINED AT THE HIP: Victoria-raised filmmaker chronicles Gord Downie’s inspired journey
Victoria-raised Jennifer Baichwal and husband chronicle tour that followed Gord Downie’s cancer diagnosis
If there’s one thing many of Jennifer Baichwal’s documentaries have had in common, it’s her acute familiarity with her subjects. It served the Montreal-born, Victoria-raised filmmaker particularly well in The Holier It Gets. Baichwal’s acclaimed, intensely personal 2000 documentary chronicles her family’s pilgrimage to India, with her husband and longtime creative collaborator Nicholas De Pencier, to scatter the ashes of her late father, Victoriabased heart and lung surgeon Krishna Baichwal Sr., in the Ganges River.
It also yielded creative dividends in Let It Come Down: The
Life of Paul Bowles, Baichwal’s intimate 1999 meditation on the enigmatic and reclusive Beat generation author she befriended in Morocco, and Manufactured Landscapes, her portrait of the industrial artistry of Edward Burtynsky, the photographer with whom she later collaborated on Watermark, about our relationship with water.
The former Oak Bay High School student’s intimate knowledge of her subject is also a hallmark of Long Time Running, the hotly-anticipated film about the Tragically Hip that she and De Pencier co-directed.
You’ll soon be hearing a lot about their documentary, which follows the Canadian band’s Man Machine Poem tour last summer.
The film, which makes its world première at the Toronto International Film Festival on Sept. 13, weaves a compelling tapestry of behind-the-scenes and concert footage, including highlights from the prolific Kingstonborn quintet’s nationally broadcast hometown tour finale.
They’re intercut with candid conversations with lead singer Gord Downie, whose announcement last year that he had incurable brain cancer inspired the musical and cinematic journey, and his bandmates.
While Downie’s diagnosis prompted assumptions this would be the end of the road for the band, it clearly wasn’t after the frontman persuaded his bandmates to do the tour despite nerve-jangling uncertainty.
It was just five days before the HIp launched its tour in Victoria that the band’s managers, Bernie Breen and Patrick Sambrook, asked Baichwal and De Pencier if they’d shoot the event, they recalled. The couple already knew the Hipsters, after all, and De Pencier had filmed the band performing in North Bay in 1994 on 16-millimetre film.
De Pencier also shot the video for Chancellor, Downie’s song from his solo album Coke Machine Glow, and footage from the band’s pop-up concert at the Great Moon Gathering in Fort Albany five years ago.
Baichwal and De Pencier had also collaborated on the creation of onstage video installations for the Hip’s Fully Completely Tour, and felt honoured being asked to do it again for Man Machine Poem.
In June last year, they began making 30 video pieces, unsure at that point which songs, and how many, would be played during the cross-country concerts.
While De Pencier was in Australia and China shooting footage for the couple’s next project, Anthropocene, Baichwal and her team at Mercury Films worked on the onstage video installations.
“We tried to create a fluid dialectic of audience and performance throughout, punctuated by intimate moments behind the scenes and reflection from the guys,” the couple said in directors’ notes.
“We were deliberately nonlinear in structure, which bothered some people, but west to east didn’t feel like the right organizing principle.”
They credited their longtime editor Roland Schlimme for being “a vital part of this exploration,” adding that handwriting featured in the film was taken from Downie’s notebooks.
The couple departed from their usual filmmaking tradition by working with many partners, and praised producers Scot McFadyen and Rachel McLean for supporting their “somewhat hermetic” process. Considering the circumstances and their belief that the film doesn’t require any additional explanation from them, Baichwal and De Pencier have opted not to do the traditional round of press interviews.
“In some ways, it was the hardest documentary we’ve made — hard and beautiful — because there was no distance or pretense of objectivity possible,” they said in a statement.
Since they’re friends and have been listening to the band since the beginning, the couple’s film became “a kind of reciprocal love letter from the band to the fans, from fans to the band, and from us to both,” they said.
RUSHES: If Krista Loughton seems to be grinning from ear to ear more than usual these days, it’s for good reason.
The Victoria filmmaker and social activist just learned that the office of federal Minister of Families, Children and Social Development Jean-Yves Duclos will host a screening of Us and Them, the social-justice documentary she codirected with Jennifer Abbott (The Corporation) for MPs on Parliament Hill on Sept. 26.
Loughton credits a local team of supporters for helping her fulfil a dream. They include Rob Reid, the businessman and philanthropist who brought her labour of love to the attention of Duclos — who later sent Loughton a handwritten thank-you letter — and Victoria Mayor Lisa Helps, who will host a send-off screening at City Hall on Sept. 11.
The achingly authentic documentary, exploring homelessness and addiction through the stories of four members of Victoria’s street community, will also be screened at the Union of B.C. Municipalities Conference in Vancouver on Sept. 25.
“The timing is exceptional,” Loughton said.
“We’re in the middle of a housing and opiod crisis in this country, and it’s never been more relevant.”