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Review: Streets of Plenty

Streets of Plenty hit home with me. Metaphorically and literally, as I’m just outside Vancouver, British Columbia myself. The film’s produced by Alex Kleider, Corey Ogilvie, and Misha Kleider. Essentially this film is about the growing problem of Vancouver’s biggest secret, the downtown eastside. I’ve walked through this neighborhood countless times and been offered crack enough to know what it’s about. It’s a scary place. What’s so special about this documentary is the way it’s done.

Misha Kleider who conceptualized the idea and is the film’s subject, chooses to embark on a twisted social experiment and live thirty days in the downtown eastside in the freezing winter, while his brother Alex and producer Corey film. On top of this, he starts with absolutely no possessions. For effect he starts his journey by removing everything but his underwear and jumping into the (way too cold) water.

This film helps document a growing problem in the DTES, something Vancouver had a serious problem attempting to cover up during the recent winter Olympics. While at times I had trouble doubting the legitimacy of this entire project, I’ve concluded he’s legit. The film does a great job of taking you first hand into its theme, considering what better way is there to document such a problem than take a subject and make it go through the problems itself? First hand experiences documented are like gold.

Multiple interviews with other homeless people and professionals show multiple possible sources of this problem at first. An overly sufficient amount of shelter, food, and clothing are provided at some shelters and this is causing some homeless to take advantage of the system and intentionally waste taxpayer’s money. Multiple opinions are given on this topic throughout the film, and interviews with the homeless help drive this point home.

Throughout the film Kleider makes a sincere effort to include all aspects of homeless life. He tries every job from pan-handling to squeegeeing, and also tries every living style from single room shelters too piss stench alley ways. What impressed me the most and essentially made this documentary what it is, is Misha Kleider taking it one step further in his attempt to include all aspects of homeless life. Drug addiction. This is where you see committed film making in its epitome, Kleider smokes crack and injects heroin. He explicitly states he wants to show what it’s truly like and show a legitimate perspective, and considering how fundamental addiction is as a source to the problems of the downtown eastside, it was very worthwhile to have in the film. Call him crazy, I call it passion. Despite huge resistance from even his brother, he smokes crack with a few addicts, gets some heroin from them to combat his crack-comedown, then heads to the all too well known, one of its kind in North America, safe injection site, ‘’Insite’’. This place allows anyone to come in and inject their stuff free of charge and serves over 600 people per day. It’s new and extremely controversial.  But Kleider admits to feeling much more secure inside with a person helping him then alone on the streets.

After ten minutes of bliss on heroin Kleider’s trip turns bad and he gives up on the project and wants to sleep in his own home. Despite this, I still consider twenty six days a success of documenting all the problems, and the heroin concludes the film in the sense that it determines the source of the DTES problem; addiction.  Kleider does a great job of not only giving us the details on this problem, but takes that extra steps and makes this film just that much more entertaining. With multiple first-hand accounts and tons of info, I loved this film and felt more interested in this growing problem once the film was done. 8/10 for me!

The film can be viewed at http://www.streetsofplenty.com.