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.