June 27th, 2009
Vancouver is many things, but perhaps most of all it is Terminal City, a place to which people escape. Movie stars and Cantopop celebrities flee there to escape the stress of their lives in Hollywood and Hong Kong; the less affluent find in Vancouver a place to get away from the constraints and conventions of society. Two films produced by the National Film Board of Canada look at some of the city’s more vulnerable people and their attempts to escape — and they also raise questions about the ethical obligations that documentarians (and, by extension, journalists and other members of the media) must confront when dealing with marginalized people.
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December 11th, 2008
The homeless guy pushing around a shopping cart full of bottles and cans is so well-entrenched in our imagination that it has become a bit of a stereotype. In cities with large concentrations of marginalized people, however, like Vancouver, they serve as a constant reminder of the dredges of the urban economy. When they are in such an unfortunate position, then, how can they assert themselves and make the city their own?
Carts of Darkness might shed some light on the answer. Former snowboarder and sports filmmaker Murray Siple turns his gaze to bottle-pickers in the suburbs of Vancouver’s North Shore who engage in an exhilarating and potentially lethal pastime: shopping cart racing. “I don’t have any furniture, I have no wife, I have no kids to look after, I got nothing,” says one of the characters in the film, explaining why he gets such a rush from something that could potentially take his life.
What seems particularly interesting about this in the context of urban space and social order is how unbelievably subversive cart racing is. Just imagine — grown men speeding down steep suburban streets in stolen shopping carts. It’s completely at odds with everything they are supposed to do and everything the environment around them tells them to do.
