CRASH COURSE

Betty is a heroin addict. She's an exhausted, stringy-haired,
filthy-mouthed woman who clings to a turbulent relationship with a fellow
addict who may be abusing her kids. She takes on the stance of a bear
protecting a threatened habitat and she's more devoted to keeping up a
consistent heroin supply than to packing her kids' lunch before school.

But somehow director Bruce Spangler and Jillian Fargey, who plays the
intense Betty in Spangler's Protection (opening at Fifth Avenue cinemas
June 8) have created an oddly sympathetic character, one not without hope.

Call it some pretty great character development, or a work experience, and
affection that echoes all too clear in the mind of director Spangler.

"It would be dangerous to be a child protection worker if you didn't
emphathize with their pain," he says.

This is the art of ambiguity, of portraying deeply troubled characters as
complex humans, frail and capable of love despite their flaws. It's an art
that demands a rejection of all stock character and stereotype. And it's
one that Spangler mastered by accident, and hard experience.

From 1998, on and off for a total of five and a half years, Spangler
worked as a child protection officer for the B.C. Ministry of Children and
Families. He was forced to juggle a caseload of up to 40 families at a
time, a burden that weighed on his conscience.

"I was living in fear that if I make a mistake it will haunt me for the
rest of my life."

Nancy Sivak plays Jane, a seasoned child protection worker with the B.C.
Ministry of Children and Families who finds herself emotionally involved
with a troubled Surrey family, headed by addict mother Betty and her
boyfriend Joe (a burly, menacing Bill MacDonald).

Little Jimmy (Giacomo Baessato), Betty's youngest son, suddenly appears at
school with a black eye that may have come courtesy of Joe's quick fists.
Or it could have just been a hockey-playing accident. Then, in an interview
with authorities, Jimmy's sister Cindy (Nicole LaPlaca) mumbles something
about Joe's unwelcome visits to her bedroom at night.

Betty and Joe absorb themselves in a tumultuous, violent relationship;
heroin is the glue that binds them and the family together. But however
screwed up they are, Spangler reveals a tenderness between the
two-including a scene in which Joe injects heroin into a vein in Betty's
neck, which evokes an intimacy akin to lovemaking.

Spangler veers from this exasperating family drama to the troubled
conscience of Jane herself. She's teetering on burnout, and seeks a sort of
refuge by purging her experiences to her date Don (Hiro Kanagawa).

True to the director's devotion to realism (the film was originally planned
as a documentary), Protection ends on an ambiguous note. Against all
traditional narrative forms, Betty and Jane seem to share an uncommon
similarity-though neither are better off in the end. Protection is about
the loss of innocence, the job's gradual pummelling of idealism and the
conscience of front-line child protection officers.

As if to illustrate the gradual erosion of faith in the system, Spangler
brings in Amy (Jennifer Copping), a social worker on the job for just six
months. She adds a fresh-faced hope, an idealism about their professions,
and of the position they are in to save or make a better life for a child.

"There are autobiographical elements in the social worker characters," says
Spangler. "I couldn't avoid that if I wanted to make an honest film rooted
in my experience."

There's something to be said for a little distance. Spangler changed the
gender of the lead social worker. "I felt if (Jane's character) were a man
it would be too close. I wanted to respect the fact that 80 per cent of the
front-line workers are women."

Through Jane's experiences, and the touching parallels he makes between
Jane and Betty, Spangler evokes a niggling feeling that whatever
"protection" the ministry offers-a child apprehension, or a pledge by a
neglectful parent to change or recover from an addiction-the same family
dynamic will play itself out again in six months. Hard work be damned,
these families and their children are coasting toward oblivion.

And then there's Surrey. Amy, upon becoming familiar with Surrey, expresses
a disdain that has long been the source of jokes. Surrey, she says, looks
like it's in a time warp, 20 years behind the times.

Perhaps. But with time-lapse photography, and the almost acrobatic feats of
photography director Brian Johnson, Spangler turns his lens to the
underbelly, and yes, the beauty and diversity of Surrey, to capture a sober
urban grit.

The large city was Spangler's beat as a "float"-a long-term casual worker
who was assigned for six months at a time in one Surrey territory or another.

"I got the vibe of the city," he says. "It's very diverse, with
middle-class areas and really affluent areas."

Granted, Spangler gives much of the credit to his stellar cast of familiar
Vancouver actors who inject a warmth into their troubled characters.

"I had confidence in the team so that I thought the only thing that could
stop us was a technical failure (a problem that never came to pass).

"It's a great feeling, knowing that everything was going to be okay."

Like an expatriate writer who can only describe home from the comforts of a
new continent, Spangler needed distance, and courage to pen Protection. He
wrote two feature films that he admits weren't very good before this
screenplay, which he wrote in 10 days.

He had short films under his belt even before he started Protection, and
he's not ready to ditch the short just yet. He's just filmed the half-hour
drama Wonderful, a black comedy about Christmas culture in North America.

"It starts out with Santa Claus on a bridge."

Spangler, who has just finished up his studies at Toronto's Canadian Film
Centre, considers Vancouver a worthy city to use the contacts he's made at
Norman Jewison's famed school. He's moving back to his hometown June 24,
after which he'll be working on the script of The Damage Done, a film about
street kids and their dicy relationship with the media, to be shot in
Vancouver.

From the sounds of it, Spangler the filmmaker is still retrieving the
passionate material gleaned from the life of Spangler the child protection
worker. But at least now, he knows he's found his place.

"I look back at my darkest days as a social worker, and I know that even
though being a filmmaker is financially stressful, I feel I'm in my natural
element. I'm doing what I'm supposed to do."