The distinguished filmmaker Nettie Wild discusses her seminal 2002 film FIX: The Story of an Addicted City, as it gets screened again as part of the DOXA: Documentary Film Festival (until 16 May 2021); the film is a look at the raucous debates in Vancouver nearly twenty years ago, as it struggled to start Canada’s first safe injection site, with Joseph Planta.

Text of introduction by Joseph Planta:

I am Planta: On the Line, in Vancouver, British Columbia, at TheCommentary.ca.

As DOXA: The Documentary Film Festival begins today, running until May 16^th, Vancouverites and Canadians alike will get another chance to see the seminal documentary Fix: The Story of an Addicted City. The film was released in 2002, and for a lot of people changed their view as to how drugs and addiction were to be handled in a city like Vancouver. The film’s director and co-producer Nettie Wild joins me again, to discuss this film, the people in it, the larger issues that the film contends with, and what’s happened since. And a lot has. Ms. Wild set out about twenty years to document the opening of Canada’s first safe injection site. She documents the struggle as Ann Livingston, the non-user, organiser of VANDU, the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users, and Dean Wilson, an outspoken drug addict and former computer salesman mobilise the Downtown Eastside community to action. They have an ally in Vancouver’s then-mayor Philip Owen. Who, when we meet him in the film, in his business garb, dancing to big band music, is a square. He’s the leader of the NPA, Vancouver’s right-wing political party, and over the course of the film we see him in action to work towards the goal of a safe injection site. Owen, Livingston, and Wilson have to counter the business community’s argument against it, not to mention Owen’s own party. It’s a compelling film, a marvelous time capsule of Vancouver as it was twenty years ago, and a look ahead to what’s happened in the years since. We are in the midst of not only the COVID pandemic, but we recently passed the fifth anniversary of the health emergency of the opioid crisis. Safe consumption sites are not only acceptable, but in demand not just in Vancouver but elsewhere in the region, in the province. Nettie Wild is the award-winning filmmaker of such movies as A Rustling of Leaves, Blockade, and KONELINE: our land beautiful. She was first on the program two years ago, when DOXA screened her critically acclaimed A Place Called Chiapas. Visit www.canadawildproductions.com. And visit www.doxafestival.ca for tickets on how to stream Fix: The Story of an Addicted City once more. Please welcome back to the Planta: On the Line program, Nettie Wild; Ms. Wild, good morning.

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