“And I just felt that it was such a strong period in my life, and I wanted to reflect on it more. “It had a beauty and sadness about it that was quite remarkable. “I remember that very moving last letter, and being very affected by it,” he says. “Know that I am so close behind you that if you stretch out your hand, I think you can reach mine.” ‘Well Marianne it’s come to this time when we are really so old and our bodies are falling apart and I think I will follow you very soon,” Cohen wrote her, the end of the film includes a scene of her friend reading the letter to her hospice bed. “So I was kind of swept off my feet,” he says by phone from London.Īnd then there was that letter, sent by Cohen to Ihlen after one of her friends contacted him to let him know that leukemia had brought her to death’s door. Cohen was off in Montreal or New York City at the time as his musical career just taking off, but his deep connections to Ihlen, who he’d met on Hydra in 1960 and who remained his partner and muse for most of the ’60s, would a half a century later result in Broomfield’s new film.īroomfield and Ihlen were also briefly lovers, he says - it was the ’60s and Leonard and Marianne’s relationship was open - and they remained friends in the decades that followed. Singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen was one of those artists, perhaps the island’s most famous. “I was a rather lost soul at that time, and she was part of that community of artists and painters and musicians in this idyllic island, which seemed like the closest I’d ever been to paradise.”
“She’s very beautiful and older than me, and sort of like a young man’s dream,” Broomfield says. Filmmaker Nick Broomfield was 20 when he washed up on the shores of the Greek island of Hydra in 1968, where within days he’d fallen hard for Marianne Ihlen, an alluring Norwegian who introduced him to the island’s creative expatriate community.
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