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.