STORY TO ACTION is our flagship program where we work with five Canadian documentary films and their filmmaking teams to create impact strategies, build partnerships, and organize screenings designed to expand audience understanding of the social and environmental issues featured in their films. This program takes each film through a customized impact campaign pilot.
THE INTERCEPTORS
The Interceptors follows the story of a new community driven, technology enabled network with the goal of reducing food waste and nourishing the Vancouver community. The film follows first generation Filipino-Canadian Chef TJ Conwi as he turns a mountain of food waste collected by Vancouver Food Runners into delicious meals which are distributed to the food insecure.
LOVE IN THE TIME OF FENTANYL
A middle-aged man overdoses on a sidewalk in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside neighbourhood, just steps from the front door of the Overdose Prevention Society where OPS staff respond with naloxone and oxygen to save his life. As illicit fentanyl began showing up in the drug supply in 2013, deaths began to skyrocket. By April of 2016, the provincial health officer declared a state of emergency. This was felt most widely in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, where injection drug use is most concentrated and where community efforts are most mobilized, innovative, and adaptive. Love in the Time of Fentanyl is an intimate portrait of a community fighting to save each other’s lives in the midst of a public health crisis. OPS founder Sarah Blyth says she does this work because “No one could justify having a person overdose in front of them and do nothing about it.” Could you?
MY NAME IS WOLASTOQ
For over 400 years, settler maps of what is now called New Brunswick have called the Wolastoq the St. John River. But the Wolastoq is the ancestral home, the life source and the namesake of the Wolastoqey – the people of the beautiful, bountiful river – since time immemorial. As we follow a young Wolastoqew man striving to reclaim a culture eroded by colonialism, we see its parallels with the Wolastoq Nation’s fight to have maps and governments accept the true name of the Wolastoq river.
THE SECRET SOCIETY
The Secret Society shines light on the complex and criminalized world of assisted reproduction in Canada: the couples desperately searching for human eggs to fertilize with sperm, the women willing to donate their eggs, and professionals who support both. Complicating the already stressful and stigmatized world of infertility, Canadian law criminalizes payment for donated eggs. These laws perpetuate the secrecy surrounding egg donation and create a bizarrely complex world of assisted reproduction.
WHO THE HELL IS NIGEL?
During the BC COVID-19 news briefings, an unwitting hero is made of Nigel Howard, a Deaf ASL interpreter who became an overnight sensation due to his dynamic interpretation style. Through his rise to fame, the underrepresentation of the Deaf community becomes glaringly evident. Who the Hell is Nigel? is a Deaf-friendly film that spotlights the needs of the Deaf community and models how to fully include them: the film uses split screens to prioritize ASL over captioning, and interpreters’ facial expressions are visible to communicate emotional tone. These are just some of the small ways to prioritize the full inclusion and participation of Deaf people in every facet of society and its joys.
