Pubdate: Sat, 09 Nov 2002
Source: Vancouver Sun (CN BC)
Copyright: 2002 The Vancouver Sun
Contact:  http://www.canada.com/vancouver/vancouversun/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/477
Author: Paula Brook

NOT MY KIND OF A FIX

 From Grief to Action is Better Fit For Schools Than Wild's Rambling Film 
Pitch For Safe-Injection Sites

Generally I like a film that leaves me squirming, at least better than I 
like one that leaves me yawning, or cowering under my husband's "I told you 
so" glare. What I really hate is when I get all three in one, as happened 
last month at the premiere of local film-maker Nettie Wild's documentary, 
Fix: Story of an Addicted City -- a rambling, rhetoric-laden pitch for 
safe-injection sites that doubled as a fawning farewell tribute to Mayor 
Philip Owen.

A big fuss was made about this movie and I can see why. It's not every day 
you get a bunch of half-crazed rabble-rousers teaming up with an 
Oxford-cloth mayor to start a revolution. We're talking about the visionary 
four-pillar approach to solving the drug problem in the Downtown Eastside, 
which Mayor Owen has bravely championed -- at his own political peril, and 
making some strange bedfellows along the way.

I can imagine a rather dramatic short feature documenting the crisis and 
the crusade -- possibly the very thing Nettie Wild intended to make: "When 
I first began this project," she told her audience, "I thought it would be 
a short film that would take about four months and would cover the opening 
of Vancouver's first safe-injection site for drug users. That was two years 
ago."

It's a shame she didn't stick with the program, because it might have come 
in on budget and in a form suitable for release into schools, sparing us 
the awkward pitch (disguised as a goodbye tribute to Owen) for money to fix 
a bad fit. This is the dilemma that sent me squirming out of the Vogue 
Theatre: I'd have written a cheque in a minute if it was going toward 
funding Vancouver's first safe-injection site, but not to help get this 
misguided film into classrooms. In fact, I'd probably pay to keep it out of 
the schools.

The problem is that Wild lets her emotions lead the way through a very dark 
thicket where what's needed more than anything is the bright light of 
reason. She gets too attached to her protagonists, telling us way more than 
we need to know in the course of the 93-minute film about their troubled 
(un)private lives. Most of the story is told through Dean Wilson, a 
foul-mouthed, tattooed heroin addict and former IBM salesman who survived 
prison by becoming a racist thug and who, like many addicts, is a brilliant 
liar, so you can probably discount the IBM part; and Ann Livingston, a 
self-styled Saint Joan of Hastings who organized the Vancouver Area Network 
of Drug Users (VANDU) while raising three boys on her own and falling in 
love with Dean Wilson, God help her.

There are also endless scenes of Philip Owen poring over draft proposals, 
jovially clapping people on the back, nearly walking through glass doors 
and the like, which don't add much to dramatic tension, but you've got to 
love the guy, and at least there's no swearing. Then there are the evil 
naysayers -- a colourful but sadly misinformed gang of beat cops, local 
business owners and Chinatown oldtimers who wouldn't know a four-pillar 
plan if they tripped over it, or so the revolutionary narrative goes.

There are scenes that will properly scare you, others that will touch you 
(the battle waged daily in rat-infested alleys by a fearless and utterly 
determined band of public health nurses warrants a film of its own). In the 
end, however, I surprised myself by feeling neither deeply moved nor 
mobilized by Fix. If anything I felt a tad guilty -- for having committed 
the eighth deadly sin: failure to empathize. But as the dust in my brain 
settled over the next few days, guilt was replaced by anger -- for having 
been tricked into feeling guilty by a project designed to do just that.

Then I saw Nijole Kuzmickas' film From Grief to Action, which documents a 
year in the hellish lives of four middle-class Vancouver families dealing 
with heroin-addicted children. And the tears flowed. Why? You could say my 
ability to selectively empathize with parents who are a lot like me and my 
husband, and whose gravely ill children are a lot like our kids, shows I'm 
afflicted with the "disposable-people" classism Wild targets in Fix. But 
that's not what this is about. A movie either works or it doesn't, and I 
don't care if it's set in Kerrisdale or the Downtown Eastside, as long as 
it's built on a message that is clear, honest and respectful of its 
subjects and audience.

 From Grief to Action, produced by Vancouver's Force Entertainment and set 
to air Nov. 17 on CBC Newsworld's The Passionate Eye, is named for the 
support/advocacy group founded a few years ago by two Kerrisdale families 
whose sons have fallen victim to the illness and to the misguided "war on 
drugs." There are now hundreds of parents from across the Lower Mainland 
actively involved in the group, including doctors, lawyers, teachers and 
homemakers who've put careers on pause to give their children the best 
start in life.

Kuzmickas, a volunteer in Big Sisters who joined From Grief to Action 
following the drug-related death of her "little sister" Melissa Coleman 
three years ago, focuses sharply on the health issue: what the illness does 
to these young people and their families, the deplorable lack of resources 
for detox and long-term treatment, and the price we all pay for the vicious 
and endless crime cycle we create when we treat the victims as criminals.

"An extremely powerful learning resource," is how Dianne Turner, principal 
of Point Grey secondary, describes the film. And it is -- not only for 
students but their parents, many of whom have already taken a lesson in 
harm reduction from the increasingly vocal Grief to Action advocates and 
who are now poised to mark their civic ballots accordingly. Indeed, some 
pundits have credited the lobby group for turning the elections into a 
mini-war on drugs -- but a righteous war, this time, with the health of our 
children and city at the forefront. Good on them.
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MAP posted-by: Alex