VANCOUVER'S DOWNTOWN EASTSIDE CINEMA VERITE

VANCOUVER, British Columbia -- The young woman's image is blurred and
unsteady as it tracks across the screen. She shifts back and forth in front
of a gritty sink, absently tending to a gaping wound that runs the length
of her forearm, which is bloated to twice its normal size from her
addiction to intravenous heroin and cocaine.

Her boyfriend, John, "wants to get a job," she explains. "He wants to get
off it. He wants to get clean. We both do."

As the camera captures her distracted attempts to dress the wound, the
woman, Carlee, in the thrall of a recent hit, appears oblivious to the fact
that moments before, John had died in the other room, the victim of a
self-inflicted handgun blast to the face, after a desperate argument in
which she forbade him to try an armed robbery to feed his drug habit.

The sequence, mere moments long, is as amateurish as it is chilling: the
camera wavers badly as Carlee shifts to and fro, her face alternately
hidden by shadow and washed out by excess light. Given the circumstances --
a violent act, Carlee's wound, the unsettling nature of a junkie's staccato
motion and halting speech -- some unease on the cameraman's part could be
understood.

But in this case, the camera is in the hands not of a professional but of
Jim Mitchell, a Vancouver police officer who arrived on the scene with his
partner, Mark Steinkampf, only moments before.

Steinkampf's presence here was no coincidence. For 18 months, he and his
colleagues -- the self-styled Odd Squad, seven beat cops hardened by years
of service on Vancouver's drug and disease-infested Downtown Eastside --
have been compiling a documentary film, "Through a Blue Lens," which will
have its premiere in Vancouver Nov. 20 and will be making the rounds of the
film festivals next year.

The group, which includes Constables Al Arsenault, Toby Hinton, Dave Kolb,
Dale Weidman, Walt McKay and Len Hollingsworth, decided long ago that the
endless stream of drug-related arrests in the area was doing little to stem
the misery caused by the high-volume drug trade. Instead, the officers had
a novel approach: document the misery and take it to the world outside.

"The point we're trying to make here is that life is a series of
decisions," Hinton explains as he and Arsenault patrol an alleyway strewn
with used syringes and needle wrappers. "Too many of the wrong ones can
land you in a place you never could have imagined -- right here."

The area of no more than a dozen square blocks, with roughly 16,000
residents packed into various shelters, single-room-occupancy hotels and
apartments, is the site of 80 percent of Greater Vancouver's drug-related
arrests, though it represents only 3 percent of the region's population.

Of the 16,000, about 6,000 are addicted to intravenous drug use. And with
those numbers comes a darker statistic as well: with an HIV infection rate
as high as 50 percent among the area's intravenous drug users, according to
the police, the Downtown Eastside had the highest rate in the developed
world in 1997.

That fact was not lost on the international press. That year, soon after
local health officials revealed their findings, reporters, camera crews and
filmmakers from around the world descended. "The Crisis Next Door," read
one front-page headline in The Seattle Times that summer; Hinton recalls
walking his beat with a six-person film crew from the BBC, eager for some
visual evidence to back up the statistics. Then, just as quickly as they
had come, the reporters dispersed, leaving the area to its miserable solitude.

Long before, though, the Odd Squad had embarked on a documentary project of
their own. Years earlier, Arsenault had started patrolling his beat with a
camera in hand. Almost everything he saw emerged as a photo opportunity:
addicts gripped by drug psychosis, overdoses, mayhem. Arsenault prepared a
slide show of his work for the squad, and soon after, each member began the
same practice. The group now has more than 2,000 photographs, which are
used as a public education tool.

The photos, bleak and chilling, are not simply a random sampling of the
area's ills, Hinton says. "Over a number of years, you get to know people,"
he says. "And over the same number of years, you start to lose people as
well" -- to AIDS, overdose or violence. "That's the hard part."

A core group of six of those people have voluntarily become subjects of
both the photographs and film. Their reasons are varied but similar.

"If I can stop any kid from going through this hell, then I'll do
everything I can to do that," Carlee says, sitting in her bleak one-room
apartment. She pulls back her shirt to reveal her upper arms, which are
heavily tracked with scars -- the result of "dope worms," a tactile
hallucination that compels addicts to dig into their flesh to free the
creatures they imagine to be burrowing inside.

"I'm ashamed to show my arms -- battle wounds, I call them," Carlee says.
"But I want to say, I want to show them, 'Look, this can happen to you."'

The trust in the Odd Squad has put the officers in an unusual position as
filmmakers, says Veronica Mannix, an independent filmmaker in Vancouver who
directed "Through a Blue Lens."

Ms. Mannix met the squad while shooting another film in the area, "Down
Here," and quickly realized that the gap between what a film crew sees and
the reality of what a police officer experiences is vast -- and that on the
Downtown Eastside, reality can too easily be bent to your will.

"You can spend a week down here -- or an hour, even -- and you'll get the
footage you're looking for," she said. "There's just so much of it you can
build whatever story you want. But it's not the real story. We were there
for eight months, and when we hooked up with these guys, they took us into
places we couldn't have imagined existed. They know every nook and cranny
of this area. What they showed us was desperation in its most tangible form."

After Ms. Mannix saw the slides, she encouraged the officers to start
shooting film. The final cut, 52 minutes culled from more than 67 hours,
will include their film interspersed with scenes shot by Ms. Mannix and her
professional crew. The quality varies, but to dramatic effect, she says.
"It has a kind of rough, personal quality that you wouldn't get from a
professional," she says.

On the beat, little has changed over the course of the project. Carlee
remains in her one-room flop, drug paraphernalia scattered about. Michelle,
26, whom Hinton has known from the street since she was 14, is headed for
rehab, but she has been there before, only to return to dealing and
prostitution to support her habit.

For these people, the police know there is little hope, Hinton says. Where
hope lies, he says, is in using their experience as an example.

"You get some sideways glances when you explain what you're doing," he
says. "But when you see this kind of progression, over and over again, you
realize what a waste it all is. We're realistic: we know that it's probably
too late for most of the people who are already here. But this is our way
of trying to stop the waste."