Meeting Jim
Meeting Jim is a feature-length documentary about a journey back to the lifetime of Jim Haynes, an extraordinary 83-year-old man who grabbed with heart and soul the spirit of the 60s and continued to carry it throughout his life. This journey becomes also a physical one when he takes a train from the city of Paris, where he lives, to London and Edinburgh, the cities where he left his unique mark.
Jim Haynes established the very first paperback bookshop in Britain; co-produced the 1962 Conference on the Novel and 1963 Drama Conference in Edinburgh – which inspired the current Edinburgh International Book Festival; co-founded the Traverse Theatre, was a catalyst for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, established the London Traverse Theatre Company, co-founded the newspaper I.T., the underground pop club U.F.O., and the London Arts Lab. He taught Media Studies and Sexual Politics at the University of Paris VIII for three decades, co-founded the sexual freedom newspaper Suck, and directed the Wet Dream Film Festival in Amsterdam. After being influenced by Gary Davis, he printed ‘World Passports’ and thousands of people travelled on them. In his Paris atelier, he created a salon tradition with open dinners every Sunday evening for some 40 years and over 150,000 guests to date – and counting…
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Ece GerDirector
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Ece GerProducer
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Marta Benavides HidalgoProducer
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Rainer KölmelProducer
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Basak Othan KocaogluProducer
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Jim HaynesKey Cast
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Project Type:Documentary
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Runtime:1 hour 16 minutes
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Completion Date:June 20, 2018
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Country of Origin:Türkiye
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Country of Filming:France, United Kingdom
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Language:English, French
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Shooting Format:DCP
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Aspect Ratio:16:9
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Film Color:Color
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First-time Filmmaker:No
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Student Project:No
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Digital Cinema Package:Unavailable
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Edinburgh International Film Festival 2018Edinburgh
United Kingdom
June 23, 2018
World Premiere
Nominated for the Best Documentary -
Valladolid International Film Festival 2018Valladolid
Spain
October 22, 2018
Spanish Premiere
Nominated for DOC ESPANA -
HOF International Film Festival 2018Hof
Germany
October 25, 2018
German Premiere -
Central Scotland Documentary Festival 2018Stirling
United Kingdom
October 7, 2018 -
Pärnu International Film Festival, 2019Pärnu
Estonia
Estonian Premiere
NOMINATED FOR ‘PORTRAITS OF GREAT ARTISTS’ -
Odessa International Film Festival, 2019Odesa
Ukraine
Ukrainian Premiere
Official Selection, ‘European Documentary Competition’ -
Ayvalik Baska Sinema Film Festival, 2019Ayvalık
Turkey
Official Selection -
Boston Turkish Film Festival Documentary Competition, 2019Boston
United States
** BEST DOCUMENTARY AWARD ** -
Covellite Film Festival, 2019Montana
United States
Official Selection -
Thessaloniki International Film Festival, 2019Thessaloniki
Greece
Media Library selection -
Vision du Reel, Media Library, 2019Nyon
Switzerland
Media Library selection -
Prague Fringe Festival, 2019Prague
Czech Republic
June 1, 2019
Chech Republic Premiere -
Krakow Film Festival, 2019Krakow
Poland
Media Library Selection -
Sheffield Documentary Festival, 2019Sheffield
United Kingdom
Media Library Selection -
Istanbul Fringe, 2019İstanbul
Turkey
Distribution Information
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AQUATIC FILMSCountry: United KingdomRights: All Rights
Ece is a filmmaker who received her Masters Degree in Film Studies at the University of Kent in 2015. This Masters programme took place both in the UK and Paris. A few years earlier, she had graduated in Film Studies at Bilgi University, Istanbul. Ece has made a number of short films and music videos as well as participated in various national and international film projects. Her short film Ten (2012), was screened and awarded in several film festivals.
Since 2016, she has been working on her first feature-length documentary film: Meeting Jim.
I met Jim in 2015 serendipitously just like the way thousands have met him before and hopefully will meet him in the future. Meeting him for a relatively long period of time brought ease, openness, and also a lot of people and ideas to my life. I was doing my master's degree in Paris while being inspired by Jim’s way of living and spending most of my free time at his atelier where people from all around the world were visiting or staying. By that time, I didn’t know his history in Edinburgh, or in London; his encounters with David Bowie, Samuel Beckett, John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Germaine Greer, Dali, and many others. As Jim is not a person who enjoys talking about himself, it wasn’t easy to learn his story from him.
My main objective was to make a film which after watching it, the audience would be inspired the way people actually feel when they meet Jim. According to The Guardian, Jim is the ‘founder of the social network’, because his life and achievements are the manifestations of his idea that, “if people could meet each other more easily, the world would become a better place”. Jim’s door has been wide open to thousands that have come from every corner of the world. I witnessed at his atelier how life could get less complicated and more beautiful if people would do what they wished to do in a non-judgemental environment.
After becoming a regular at his famous Sunday dinner parties, through my own experience of meeting Jim, I decided to make a film about him and his unique way of living. The people who were involved in making this film also met on a Sunday night dinner. Thanks to this powerful encounter, we were all ready for a true adventure which would take us into Jim's planet and let us follow him from one city to the other for nearly two months. Although I wasn’t a documentarist and was coming from fiction film background, spending time with him motivated me on being courageous enough to discover an unfamiliar field and start a project around this idea of introducing Jim to the world.
