The Wedding Contract: A Balinese Love Story

The majority of the footage we see in the film was shot on Bali between 1976 and 1991. The earliest footage was shot by D.A. Pennebaker himself, who had become good friends with Dawkins while filming the theatre group Dawkins was involved with back in the 1970s. “He offered us some 8mm cameras, but we weren’t really interested back then,” Dawkins recalls. “Then I went to Bali and was having this unbelievable experience – I cabled Pennebaker and asked him to send me one of those cameras. He showed up in person, with 12 rolls of film, and we used it all. When I got back to New York, I saw he’d put the wrong music with the wrong footage, so he asked me to sync it up for him. I didn’t know anything about film back then – but I was hooked.”