syringes/cringes

There is a bunch of money flowing through this city. Cranes peak higher, sweaty laborers carry material and traffic gets jammed. Nice buildings appear: cookie cutter designer interiors, packaged lifestyles. There are a lot of fancy cars driving around this city too. Vancouver is a highly desirable city with stupidly obvious natural beauty – of course it will attract wealth. Oh, the Olympics are coming and with glowing hearts, a ton of cash is being spent on that. Anyone who has spent five minutes in this town could’ve come to these revelations. Some other things they probably noticed: a mild breeze of urine stink, an abundance of pan-handlers and inexorably, the post apocalyptic desolation of the Downtown Eastside. Capilano film professor Charles Wilkinson’s documentary Down Here opens with a few frank shots of atypical DTES sights. For the next forty odd minutes the film attempts to voice the stories of those who are dismissed daily as Vancouver’s lost souls.

One of the first things Mr. Wilkinson allows the audience to learn about his subjects is simply what they wanted to be when they grew up. Is this question a humanizing equalizer that takes us all back to the innocence of childhood? Or, are the responses (eg – “I wanted to be a figure skater”), being exploited as a direct route to our emotional heartstrings, which seem yanked not plucked?

Following this opening, Down Here covers a standard list of issues including prostitution, violence, crime, disease, housing and ineludibly, drug addiction. Mr. Wilkinson tries to take these problems out of the context of the DTES by prohibiting his subjects from mentioning the area by name. He also refrains from showing us any iconic Vancouver imagery and chooses a black backdrop for the interviews. This earnest de-contextualization is valid but ultimately undermined; if removing the particular connotations of the DTES was the goal then why ask a subject to smoke crack? Hearing stories of the horror drug addiction brings is already effective enough, and arguably more tasteful. Once again yanking at those heartstrings, Mr. Wilkinson zooms into the cross worn around her neck and forces the obviously apparent contrast right down our throats. Could there be redemption?

Down Here finishes by asking its subjects to look forward, and their outlook on the future is expectedly grim. We’ve heard their past, present and thoughts on the future yet nothing about Down Here really moves us- the problem is so evident that awareness is not a solution. It is certainly commendable for Mr. Wilkinson to try and give the people down there a voice. What they really needed was a shout.