No one ends his first day living in poverty wearing a three-piece suit.
Except for Misha Kleider, an inquisitive and opinionated Vancouverite who played guinea pig for 30 days in Streets of Plenty, a documentary on navigating social services while surviving life on the desperate streets of the Downtown Eastside.
The film begins with Kleider alone, wet and wearing next-to-nothing while roaming downtown Vancouver.
When Kleider finds cover, he’s given meals, a spiffy wardrobe along with a host of amenities.
The film, a mash-up where Super Size Me meets homelessness, moves quickly to a cheeky critique on spending for social programs and how easily they can be accessed.
“Misha did have opinions going in,” said director Corey Ogilvie. “Interestingly, his opinions weren’t sympathetic left-wing, bleeding-heart liberal opinions, which a lot of ethnographers would have.
“They would want to see how hard it is. They want to go see the constraints, the socio-economic variables of marginalization and all of these things. But, Misha went in completely the opposite, thinking these people are scamming the system.”
The life may seem easy but Kleider soon shows, handouts do little for homeless who suffer from addiction and/or physical and mental illness.
“All it takes is one stroke of bad luck and you can be thrust into a shit-mix of chaos of where there’s disease, of where there’s violence of where there’s drugs and that’s effectively what happened,” Ogilvie said.
The plot thickens as Kleider and crew push themselves to find the pulse driving people to pavement day in and day out. As days turned to weeks, Ogilive, who partnered with Kleider and his brother Alex, would continue to push their boundaries by panhandling and dumpster diving.
Filled with fair-weather friends, the open-air drug market – which fuels frenetic activity in the DTES – quickly became apparent.
On a winter night, Ogilvie joined Kleider who would do the extraordinary by smoking crack cocaine in an alley surrounded by dozens of other users. When the courage from the crack kicked in Kleider decided to shoot heroin for the first time at Insite.
Ogilvie said the experience revealed the true cause of homelessness.
“We believe that addiction is an existential threat,” Ogilvie said. “It’s something you can’t solve with money. You can throw $45 billion at the DTES and you’re not going to end addiction.
“You can’t solve it with policy. You can’t solve it with social services. Our point is that you can solve it within yourself. We think it’s an individual choice and some people just won’t be able to get out.”
Ogilvie has been criticized for using much-needed services to produce the film.
“For us, it was a question of the greater good,” Ogilvie said. “Yes, we did withhold services by using them, but on the flip side, 8,000 people have watched the video fully in just about a month. We’ve honestly opened an issue that nobody else has ever really done.”
