FIXING A PROBLEM

A Documentary On The Drug Scene In Downtown Vancouver Becomes As Much A
Discourse On Political Intrigue As A Study Of Addiction

It's a paradox. Just metres away from a Yates Street alley where heroin
addicts used to shoot up until a recent police crackdown, a provocative
documentary about solutions to that very problem in Vancouver is about to open.

Equally bizarre is that the film, ushered in with the kind of promotional
push usually reserved for blockbusters, is capturing more attention than
the Hollywood fare it will compete with starting Friday at the Odeon.

Nettie Wild couldn't be happier about that.

"Cineplex Odeon really stepped up to the plate," said the Vancouver
filmmaker whose documentary FIX: The Story of an Addicted City briefly
became a top-grossing movie when it opened at the Granville 7 Cinemas last
fall.

Although her film is a powerfully intimate, eye-opening portrait of drug
abuse in Vancouver's notorious Downtown Eastside as seen through the eyes
of addicts, leaseholders and politicians, FIX just isn't the kind of movie
you'd expect would do that kind of business.

Indeed, Wild recalled with a laugh the other day, Toronto-based Cineplex
booker Tony Cianciotta was understandably incredulous before he agreed to
take a chance on a gritty little film about drug abuse when she begged the
chain to provide a window for her film festival hit.

"There's potential for these theatres to be the village well," said Wild,
an acclaimed dynamo whose sunny disposition belies the dark subject of the
documentaries she's best known for -- probing award-winners such as A Place
Called Chiapas (1998) and Blockade (1993).

Indeed, FIX, which Wild completed last July after spending two years in
back alleys, council chambers and at public rallies to explore a festering
social problem, will likely generate lively post-screening discussions
during its run in Victoria, where our own drug problem is getting downright
ugly. Says Wild: "I think it will help you think about problems that are
already happening in your town."

The first of several community forums begins after Friday's 7 p.m. show and
will feature Victoria Mayor Alan Lowe, street nurse Ann Drost and Philip
Owen, the conservative former mayor of Vancouver whose harm reduction plan
got him ousted from his own party, the Non Partisan Association.
(Ironically, Larry Campbell was swept into power on a drug strategy
remarkably similar to Owen's.)

Whether FIX will enjoy a long run in Victoria, Courtenay or Campbell River
remains to be seen, but Wild isn't in this for the money.

"We're taking it onto one screen at a time," said Wild, whose film's
Vancouver Island release will expand to Quesnel, Prince George, Smithers
and Prince Rupert in the spring, and then on to the Kootenays and Kamloops
before it starts a cross-Canada tour.

"We just want to make as much money in one town to get us down to the next
town."

Wild said she hoped the limited Victoria engagement, co-sponsored by the
B.C. Nurses Union, the Times Colonist, the City of Victoria, CBC Radio,
Laurel Point Inn, Vancouver Island Health Authority and UVic, would get
reaction similar to what the film coaxed at Vancouver forums.

"It was quite emotional," she recalled. "You'd be amazed at how people
would come clean about using, even if it was later on in the lobby.

"We're getting people to start talking about the unspeakable."

Wild, who also made A Rustling of Leaves: Inside the Philippine Revolution
(1989), is no stranger to exotic war zones. Who knew she'd end up
chronicling a complex, controversial revolution that has reached the
boiling point in her own backyard, however? Or that her film would effect
the kind of change that helped turn last November's Vancouver municipal
vote into what she calls "the drug election."

The original intention of Wild and co-producer Betsy Carson was to make a
documentary that would focus on efforts by the Vancouver Area Network of
Drug Users (VANDU) to open safe injection sites to protect addicts whose
lives were threatened by overdoses or diseases caused by sharing needles in
urine-soaked alleys.

FIX took on a life of its own, however, evolving as much into a love story
as a chronicle of carnage as it observed the struggles of two passionate
but mismatched advocates of safe drug use who became romantically involved
during filming.

These key players are outspoken Eastside activist and VANDU president Dean
Wilson, a heavily tattooed former IBM salesman and longtime heroin addict;
and Ann Livingston, a headstrong Christian activist and single mom.

The turning point in a film that could have been a dry polemic, however,
was when the straight-arrow mayor entered the picture.

Wild felt duty-bound to get Owen's take on the drug problem after talking
to addicts and activists on the street, but rather than being a dismissive
smooth-talker, the mayor expressed genuine compassion. He headed down skid
row, hobnobbing with concerned merchants and querying addicts, and came up
with a controversial four-part harm reduction program that would include
opening Canada's first safe injection site. This was much to the
consternation of alarmed councillors who voted in favour of his plan, yet
would later push him out of his own party.

FIX fluidly intercuts the concerns of Gastown and Chinatown merchants and
citizens opposed to safe injection sites with scenes of Wilson and
Livingston bickering over Wilson's addiction, commentary from addicts and
protesters and the observations of a cop who likens policing drug abuse at
Main and Hastings to "shovelling water." The heart of this unsettling slice
of life and death, however, is the wealthy, well-meaning mayor's unlikely
alliance with the streetwise activists. It was, in effect, an act of
political suicide.

"The film's about a super square guy who follows what's in his heart," Wild
said.

A documentarian's dream is to find extraordinary people in extraordinary
situations, she added.

When she found Wilson and Livingston and Owen -- "all three are
showboaters" -- she says she hit the motherlode.

"You couldn't make this stuff up in Hollywood."

Indeed, there are a number of priceless scenes in FIX, as when city
councillors, one by one, slowly and grudgingly raise their hands in favour
of Owen's harm reduction plan based on a successful European model after
intense debate. These moments offset the most harrowing sequences, like one
that lingers over a needle-wielding junkie clumsily trying to find a
suitable neck vein for her partner in an alley.

And, yes, says Wild, that scene was the real deal -- except it took much
longer than the two minutes spent on camera.

How did Wild gain the trust of her damaged subjects, like the jumpy,
strung-out addict who says she "didn't just wake up one day and decide to
be a junkie" and often feels like such a wreck she can't help but "dance
the funky chicken."

"If we slowed down enough to ask permission, they were blown away,"
recalled Wild. "People were telling us their stories, whether it's about
heroin or whatever . . . . It's the loneliest feeling if you think people
don't know or just don't get it."

She said some of the addicts' attitudes were as much of a surprise to her
as Owen was.

"That's what it's about...It's OK to park your assumptions at the door."

Her biggest frustration? Being denied access to political backstabbing at
closed-door meetings.

"The great thing doesn't happen the moment they face the camera," she said.
"It's not during the press scrum."

She said "daggers were disappearing into different backs" as the election
campaign took on Machiavellian proportions, but she couldn't get in.

"It was crazy-making," she lamented. "Editing was a nightmare. At one point
I said, 'We're going to have to use thought bubbles.' "

Wild likens her slow-going documentary approach to going fishing.

"You have to put your line in the water and wait for something to happen.
It's trying to get close to this thing called truth."

Although there are moments in the film when Owen risks looking buffoonish,
as when he cheerfully urges junkies to cut back, or praises Wilson for
kicking the habit, even though he's still using, Wild says she tends to let
the facts speak for themselves.

"When the contradictions are there, I do go after them," she admits.

"You embrace the fact that (Wilson) is charismatic but that he's lying to
himself, or that Owen is a really good guy but also a politician's politician."

Even when the going got tough with Wilson and Livingston as they squabbled,
Wild said they never asked her to turn off the camera.

It was the same with Owen, who has become such a champion of Wild's film he
turned his Mayor's Farewell event last fall into a gala fund-raiser that
garnered $140,000 to help Canada Wild Productions get FIX into schools and
movie theatres across Canada.

"Stereotypes rob us," Wild says. "You come to terms with the humanity of
the man in the suit."

Indeed, FIX has amply illustrated drug addicts are wounded human beings,
not as they may be negatively perceived.

It also answers what Wild describes as the "delicate" question.

"At the end of the day is every life precious? Or are the lives of the
smelly, loud or whatever people negotiable?"

Box Office

What: Fix: the story of an addicted city

Director: Nettie Wild

Where: Odeon

Rating: 4