Through a Blue Lens
16 April 2008, early morning
I watched Through a Blue Lens at DIGIN to DOCS this past Monday. This is the second film in the series being shown at Bloor Collegiate. The film was shot by a group of police officers working in Vancouver’s infamous Downtown Eastside. The cops and the addicts have a very good rapport with one another, which makes for an interesting movie. The addicts let the officers shoot them in some pretty rough shape, and they are very frank about their addiction, their prior lives, etc. It’s a very gritty look at addiction. One lady explains how she ended up with this huge open sore on her arm: basically she picked away at it so much when she got high because she thought bugs were crawling all over her. And once it was all open she started shooting up in it. It was like a nastier larger version of the sore in Requiem for a Dream. And she had more scars like that all over her body. It scared me straight. (Also, the cops were at her place because her boyfriend had just shot himself in the head in front of her.) This was 10 minutes into the film, tops. And the movie just keeps going from there. Through a Blue Lens is a great documentary, well worth watching.
I couldn’t stay for the discussion that followed, which kind of sucked. They had a good line-up of people.
The official Through a Blue Lens web site. Michael has a writen about the film as well.