WILD'S RIDE WITH THE MAYOR

Film-Maker Nettie Wild Found Herself On Philip Owen's Side Of War On Drugs

In the most professional sense, it was documentary duty that pushed
film-maker Nettie Wild to interview Mayor Philip Owen. In the most honest
and, in truth, cynical sense, it was the expectation that she could capture
Owen on the Downtown Eastside as "Daffy Duck in Hell."

In the end, she captured something else entirely. She captured a love
story, a public health saga and a political soap opera.

The germ of the story was simple -- and played into Wild's documentary
sensibilities. An award-winning film-maker who has spent time in remote
corners of the world, documenting revolutionary movements in Mexico, in A
Place Called Chiapas, and the Philippines, with A Rustling of Leaves, Wild
noticed a small revolution brewing in her own backyard in the late 1990s
and decided to pull a team together to chronicle its evolution.

The project became FIX: The Story of an Addicted City, recently named
co-winner of the People's Choice Award at the Vancouver International Film
Festival, and centrepiece of the Mayor's Farewell at a special (and
sold-out) gala fund raiser at the Vogue Theatre tonight.

The film opens theatrically Friday at the Granville 7, marking the end of a
two-year shoot that changed the lives of everyone involved, as well as the
beginning of what Wild -- as well as her subjects -- hope to be a wholesale
revision of the way society approaches issues of addiction.

Wild started her voyage -- as she always does -- on the street level,
talking to those without a formal voice to hear the stories that haven't
been told. She began with community activists and members of the Vancouver
Area Network of Drug Users (VANDU), and slowly worked her way up the
socio-political ladder to knock on the doors of Downtown Eastside
leaseholders, land owners and, finally, Vancouver politicians.

"I figured that I had to talk to the mayor. I couldn't just wheedle my way
into the lives of those people at VANDU, and in the community, and not talk
to the other side. I had the get to the heartbeat of the story. I had to
talk to the mayor -- but at first, it was really just a sense of duty that
brought me to you," says Wild, looking at Owen across the buffed boardroom
table that sits in the middle of the mayor's wood-panelled office.

Owen laughs. "I heard there was someone named Nettie Wild who wanted to
interview me, and I thought to myself, that's nice -- but I'm kind of
busy," says Owen.

"You see, that's what I was trying to get past," says Wild. "You have to
get past the formalities in order to get the goods. I don't want polite
interviews -- there's hours and hours of polite interviews that never made
it into the film. I wanted to get the mayor -- outside of the safety zone."

Wild admits she walked into the project tainted by a lot of personal
baggage about the mayor's conservatism. She figured he was a straight arrow
without any real comprehension of the desperation downtown. As a result,
when she finally got her chance to play 20 life or death questions with
Owen, she asked him to do it at Drug Users' Ground Zero: the midst of the
Downtown Eastside.

"I thought, let's see if he'll go out into the streets ... but the minute
we get down there, he knows the name of every person on the lease, the name
of every business owner, the names of users -- he even knows the street
price of heroin and cocaine!" says Wild, her eyes wide with disbelief.

"I took one look at Kirk [Tougas, the director of photography], and he says
to me, 'We've got a live one here.' We were suddenly running around,
following the mayor through the streets of the Downtown Eastside, just
burning through tape ... I mean, Phil -- face it -- you're a bit of a
motormouth," says Wild.

Owen laughs. In fact, Owen laughs a lot throughout this two-hour meeting at
city hall -- especially when talk moves on to the subject of Jennifer
Clarke, the alleged usurper who has been drawn as the Lady Macbeth in
Owen's dramatic, and highly publicized, political fall.

Owen laughs, but he doesn't talk about Clarke by name.

He smiles and says simply: "They cut me off at the knees because they are
afraid of change. But I think everyone in this city realizes the status quo
is not going to solve the problem. It's time for action, and hopefully,
this movie FIX will help educate people out there. That's why we have to
get it out to the schools, that's why we need to raise this money. We have
a job to do, and we're not going to stop now," says Owen.

"The mayor is just too classy a guy to trash anyone. He won't even mention
her name. But I have no problem talking about Jennifer Clarke," says Dean
Wilson, one of the central personalities in FIX, and a VANDU organizer.

Wilson says he also had a lot of baggage about the mayor, but on the second
day of filming, he began to see Owen in a different light.

"It's a scene that actually takes place at the beginning of the film. I'm
in the van with other VANDU people and we're heading off to city hall to
make a presentation," says Wilson, referring to the 2000 procession into
council carrying a symbolic coffin representing the hundreds of
drug-related deaths on the Downtown Eastside.

"While I was in the van, I was thinking of how we were going to make the
most of the opportunity. I felt that if we were going to make this
personal, we'd lose the focus, and that was people are dying down there. If
we were going to do this, the mayor had to be on side," says Wilson.

Hoping the mayor would listen if he played by the "rules," Wilson said he
would only ask for five minutes of council's time, after which he -- and
the rest of the protesters -- would leave without further disturbance.

Wilson did stick to his word. The mayor did take notice.

"You see Dean outside there, in the movie, and he says there will no chaos.
He stuck to the deal. I saw Dean a bit later at a police board meeting, and
he said again, he'd speak for five minutes -- and again, he did. He stuck
to his word. That's when I realized here's a serious guy -- a guy I can
work with. We respect each other's space, we aren't demeaning each other
and we're both focused on making a positive change. We've built a bond of
trust. In the end, that's all that matters, really, now isn't it? We want
to stop people from dying," says Owen.

"Look, I didn't come to this conclusion off the bat. It took time to see
there was no other way of dealing with the problem. I went to meetings
around the world, and it soon became apparent that you can't legislate your
way out of it, you can't incarcerate your way out of it, and you can't
leave the status quo. The only way to begin solving the problem is to deal
with it realistically, and that is the four-pillar approach that I've
worked so hard to introduce," says Owen.

"This hasn't been easy for me, or for my family. But what are you going to
do? So what if I've lost some of my social friends. Sure, I've been dropped
off a few dinner party invitation lists since this all started. Oh yes, my
wife has noticed. She knows. But so what? That's not going to stop me. It
only makes me more determined than ever to make sure we don't start
backsliding -- which is, sadly, the direction that some of my colleagues
want to take."

As the spectre of Clarke reappears at the boardroom table, Wilson -- the
tattooed drug user and former IBM computer salesman -- gets back to his point.

"All of us have moved a lot in terms of the way we all see each other,"
says Wilson, who admits being a buddy of the mayor can have ramifications
in his social circle as well.

Wilson believes Clarke has gone out of her way to steer the public away
from embracing harm reduction.

Wild and Owen decide to steer the conversation in a different direction.

"I tried to get into the back door meetings, to see whose knife was in
whose back," says Wild. "But they wouldn't let me in ... I wanted to get to
the bottom of the conflict, and really, what I think this is all about is
that by addressing the problem, you're outing the issue of drug addiction.
This is about shame and keeping so-called dirty secrets in the closet,"
says Wild.

"Only by coming out of the closet can you solve the problem. We have to
take the shame out of the equation and realize we're talking about lives. I
mean, is there anyone in our community who is disposable? You hope not, but
that's not the message you put out when you're busy trying to bury the truth."

Wild says she hopes the film becomes something of a "coming out ceremony"
for the city itself, and a way to move past the fear and shame that comes
with a serious addiction issue. She had no idea Owen would be right there
by her side, and become the film's most significant champion. Yet, that's
the exactly what happened when Wild told the mayor she needed cash to put
the film in schools and theatres across the country because Telefilm -- the
government-funded agency that provides financial assistance to film-makers
- -- wouldn't pay for the digital-to-film transfer because it was a
documentary, not narrative fiction.

"It was a real slap in the face because every other film I've made has put
money back into the system," says Wild. "But they said no and we needed
$100,000 to get the transfer. That's when the mayor stepped up to the table
and donated his farewell party to the cause."

Thanks to Owen's support -- as well as the support of community business,
including The Vogue Theatre, The Vancouver Sun and Rocky Mountain Sound --
the $100-a-ticket FIX benefit tonight will raise in excess of $100,000
which will go towards getting FIX into every high school in the country,
not to mention every layer of government that deals with public health.

"At this point, it's very exciting and totally rewarding to see every level
of the community step up to the table," says Wild. "It feels like it's the
beginning of something quite revolutionary ... We can make a difference.
This is a story about people trying to get control of their lives and a
city trying to get control of its life. It can happen. I feel like this is
the first step."

Owen takes a deep breath, looks out at the commanding view of the city
before him. "I've talked to other mayors in the U.S ... one even held up a
hanky and said he surrenders -- the war on drugs has been an absolute
failure ... other cities are dealing with the same problem we're dealing
with, and they're talking about decriminalization, about liberalization,"
he says.

"Look, this issue is not going away. It's getting worse. We have to act
now. We have work to do, so let's get busy. I'm not going to stop. I'm not
going anywhere. This is just the beginning."

FIX: The Story of an Addicted City's benefit screening tonight at the Vogue
is sold out, but those eager to catch it before it airs on television can
see it at the Granville 7, where it opens Friday.