A passion for social justice: the activist films of Nettie Wild

TAKE ONE, March-May, 2003 by Tom Lyons

Vancouver, 1981: The game-show contestant is nervous. The host of the show has just asked her what she would do if she won an expensive new home. The clock is ticking. The studio audience is restless and the time-up buzzer is about to blare. "I'd live in the house!" guesses the contestant, a polite lower-middle-class lady who works as a dental hygienist to pay her rent and support her son.

Wrong. The host shakes his head. The audience groans. The next contestant is the lady's greedy landlord. He says he'd sell the house and use the profits to buy and sell more real estate. The host smiles. The audience cheers. The landlord wins a stack of cash and the right to evict his tenant. That's because, the host explains, the money-grasping landlord is on the inside track! Just like the title of the game show, which is called The Inside Track! Get it? A laugh riot, right?

Apparently not, judging by the underwhelming public response to the 1981 film that features the game-show parody. Titled Right to Fight, the satirical documentary on Vancouver's housing crisis livens up its earnest interviews with not only wacky game-show parodies but also anti-capitalist tap dance numbers and bouncy cabaret pieces about the evils of unregulated land speculation. Despite its rousing pleas for social justice, and its energetic hoofing, the "springtime-for-Stalin" movie fails to attract much of an audience. Its novice writer/director, Nettie Wild, who doubled as the nervous game-show contestant, also fails to win much attention.

The Philippines, 1987: The plucky Ms. Wild is making a second attempt to film the people's glorious revolutionary struggle, and has gotten herself into more I Love Lucy-like troubles. Only this time the sadistic game-show figure tormenting her is for real. She is in the Philippines interviewing a notorious small-town DJ who spins syrupy MOR ballads, broadcasts anti-communist propaganda, and leads a paramilitary' death squad that assassinates peasant guerrillas and those who support them. Ms. Wild supports the guerrillas. The DJ threatens to kill her. Her cameraman suggests they wind up the interview. Ms. Wild tells him to keep filming. The DJ continues bullying Ms. Wild and exposing his chop-women-into-hamburger serial killer side to the camera while "Color My World" plays in the background.

Mrs. Aquino, the new president of the Philippines, is caught on Wild's camera shortly afterwards praising the same DJ for his outstanding vigilante work. The bizarre images open up a crack in the comforting Western belief that democracy and sanity have triumphed in the Philippines with the deposing of dictator Ferdinand Marcos. The film that comes out of Ms. Wild's eight-month visit with the peasant guerrillas and their opponents, A Rustling of Leaves: Inside the Philippines Revolution, is noticed. It picks up rave reviews, a Genie nomination and distributors. Ms. Wild is also noticed. RCMP officers phone up the NFB and Canada Council bureaucrats who helped financed her trip and demand they cut off her funding. It seems Ms. Wild has been suddenly upgraded from obscure activist filmmaker to national security threat. Her lawyer is impressed.

Ottawa, 2002: Ms. Wild visits Parliament Hill with Philip Owen, the outgoing mayor of Vancouver. They are there to show a copy of Ms. Wild's new documentary, FIX The Story of an Addicted City, to Anne McLellan, the new federal health minister, other cabinet ministers and policy-makers. The documentary is a plea for the establishment of safe injection sites in Vancouver. The sites are necessary, say Ms. Wild and the mayor, to reduce the soaring rates of fatal overdoses and HIV infections in the city's massive heroin-addict population. Thousands of addicts have died over the past decade, and thousands more will perish if something isn't done, they say.

Addicts and their advocates have been making this argument since the early 1990s, to no avail. McLellan's minions listen to Owen, watch Wild's film and grant formal approval for the sites, even though such centres--where heroin is injected in a clean and supervised environment--are technically illegal. The new mayor of Vancouver, Larry Campbell, has also taken a strong stand in favour of safe injection sites.

The victory, however, makes Wild's documentary, which picked up a glowing review in Variety, seem outdated to some activists. That's because its coverage of the Vancouver crisis ends in the summer of 2002 on a downbeat note. The concluding tide cards announce that the central figure of the documentary, Dean Wilson, a heroin addict and president of the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users, has failed in his attempts to quit heroin and in his efforts to open safe injection sites. The tide cards also explain that Mayor Owen has just been kicked out of his own party, the conservative non-partisan Alliance, for supporting the harm-reduction approach to addiction.

"One woman said, 'can't you change the title cards at the end of the movie and reveal the next chapter that shows that in the end the (safe injection crusade) was triumphant? Because if we show Owen's defeat it will just be a signal for politicians not to take chances,"' says Wild, in a phone interview from her home in Vancouver where she runs an independent production company, Canada Wild Productions, with co-producer Betty Carson. "And I said to her: 'The fact of the matter is that this guy (ex-mayor Owen) did take a huge political hit.' And what's interesting is that these guys took huge hits, they really hurt and they still stood up to it. So that's an even more heroic story. It's also saying: 'Hey look, you know, this is no cakewalk."