BRINGING JUNKIES TO A CINEMA NEAR YOU

Director Nettie Wild Wants Everyone To Get Fix

Here is what it takes to conquer the X-Men: drug addiction and civic
unrest. Canadian filmmakers have always struggled to get their films seen,
and lately, the question of how has divided the industry between those who
advocate quotas in the vein of CRTC CanCon regulations and those who
believe big-budget mainstream marketing is the only way for indigenous
product to compete with Hollywood (see -- or, more likely, don't -- the
flop Foolproof for evidence of how well that's working). While the debate
rages on, a small documentary called Fix: The Story of an Addicted City, an
intimate portrait of a social movement in Vancouver's drug-ravaged Downtown
Eastside, has been quietly selling out cinemas across the country.

"In Kelowna, we out box-officed X2: X-Men United, and we've been held over
in most of the cities where we've played," says Nettie Wild, the film's
director, beaming. Wild is a first-class hustler, as most independent
filmmakers have to be. She eschews publicists, leaving lengthy phone
messages of her own, and chatters a mile a minute at our interview.
Thursday night, Wild inaugurates Fix's Toronto run, nearing the end of a
year-long tour that's hit 30 cities and towns across Canada."We're a bit of
a travelling circus sideshow," she says.

Following each premiere, Wild hosts a forum with a panel of the movie's
unlikely "stars": Dean Wilson, the face of VANDU, the Vancouver Area
Network of Drug Users, and a heroin user; Anne Livingston, VANDU founder
and Dean's sometime lover; and Philip Owen, Vancouver's former mayor.
Against the backdrop of the drug epidemic that has seized the city's
downtown east side for more than a decade, Wild documents the difficult
love affair between Wilson and Livingston -- she's a straight Christian,
he's a former IBM salesman and functioning heroin addict who never manages
to quit -- and Owen's trajectory from fuddy-duddy politico to advocate for
safe-injection sites, a stance that helped him get ousted from his party
and lose his office.

"We didn't want Fix to play only in rep cinemas or on TV. We wanted it side
by side with big stuff," says Wild."I make films for people to see.

You wheedle your way into the hearts and minds of an extraordinary
community like this one, you don't then go: 'Oh well, too bad, the Canadian
distribution scene is tough, I'll let it play on TV once.' It's an
unwritten social contract that something must happen with the film --
people must see it."

Wild has done time in war zones -- she made the Genie Award-winning
documentary A Place Called Chiapas -- but it was only when she had her car
broken into that she realized the magnitude of the crisis in her own city.
The thief took an armful of Beta tapes from her back seat, worthless to
anyone but Wild. Frantic, she began her search of the area around Hastings,
Vancouver's formerly glorious downtown strip that's now a boarded-up,
spray-painted living room for the city's users.

"I went around into the alley, which is Blood Alley," says Wild, a
self-explanatory nickname. "I opened the lid of a Dumpster and I don't know
who gave who the biggest heart attack -- me or the guy who was shooting up
in the Dumpster." In that moment, Wild recalls, everything shifted. Though
she'd lived in the city for years and heard about its drug problem, she
says: "It's different from where you understand something intellectually as
opposed to really getting it. It took that guy's face, the look in his
eyes, a snapshot of degradation, and I got it."

News images of Vancouver's beleaguered downtown -- even in daylight,
addicts appear so splayed and crippled-looking, the streets so filthy, that
it looks like a bomb went off minutes ago -- are such common media fodder
out west that they've become almost meaningless. Indeed, many of the people
Wild interviewed were sick of cameras being thrust in their faces. "I had
one woman tell me, 'Journalists are assholes,' to which I responded, 'I'm
not a journalist!' "

Wild and her crew gained trust by hanging around downtown for 18 months,
capturing 350 hours of footage. "There are all sorts of boring events and
meetings, but I'm looking for those little 30-second glimmers where people
break out of rhetoric. You know the Leonard Cohen line: 'The crack is how
the light gets in?' We're looking for those moments when people stumble and
humanity gets in."

The result is that Wild animates a cold, political issue. She lets her
subjects talk, and in doing so, they become people, free of their
statistical burden. It's not a heroic portrait, but it is often moving, and
complicated. Indeed, Wild says Wilson and Livingston are now the parents of
an 11-month-old boy, and that Wilson is still using.

In the film's most harrowing scene, a woman asks a friend to inject her
neck in an alley. The episode lasts four minutes in the film but took 24 to
shoot. "We almost lost our sound recordist. Twenty minutes of watching
somebody poke around trying to find a vein -- it's tough," says Wild. "Then
[the user] gets up and delivers the soliloquy of the movie."

Many of the addicts in the film are also activists, and their cause is
this: Between 1990 and 2000, 1,200 people died in Vancouver from overdoses,
a catastrophe by international standards. Fix shows a scruffy group of
Downtown Eastside residents calmly entering City Hall, a coffin on their
shoulders, confronting a panel of uncomfortable politicians.

"Within the debate about addiction is the question: Do you embrace harm
reduction and go to where people are and help them from there -- needle
exchanges and safe injection sites? Or do you say: 'Abstinence first, and
then help them,' " says Wild. "But for these people, their friends are
dying. It's time to hurry it up."

Fix shows Owen -- first cautious, then bold -- backing a "four pillars"
approach that suggests investigating the viability of safe injection sites.
For this, he was eventually ousted from his party only to watch the
mayor-elect, Larry Campbell, follow the four pillars platform to victory
last November. By this time, Fix had played in Vancouver to overwhelming
response.

"Were we responsible for changing the election outcome? Probably not, but
there's a lasting legacy for the film that I'm proud of," says Wild. "We're
part of the fabric."

Last month, Campbell oversaw the opening of Canada's first safe injection
site, a small non-descript storefront in downtown Vancouver where users can
shoot up in a safe environment.

"We kept bugging the politicians: 'When is the site going to open, because
we have to change the end of our movie!' " laughs Wild. Finally, she did
have to change the final sequence.

"It has to be said that the life of the drug users on the east side is
still wretched," says Wild. "Nothing is going to be solved by one little
safe injection site, but it's the sign of a community coming of age."

Fix screens tomorrow at 7 p.m. at the Varsity Cinema. A discussion follows,
with special guests Larry Campbell, Mayor of Vancouver, and former mayor
Philip Owen. Fix will play at the Carlton Friday to Oct. 23, with
twice-daily community forums. Go to www.fixtoronto.ca for details.