"Edmonton filmmakers screen harrowing organ transplant documentary" ("Memento Mori")/ "The stories they tell" ("The Stairs")

Nov.  9, 2016 "Edmonton filmmakers screen harrowing organ transplant documentary": Today I found this article by Fish Griwosky in the Edmonton Journal:

  

Edmonton filmmaker-anthropologist Niobe Thompson has sprinted faraway deserts, hung off a cliff to scoop seabird eggs and learned to hold his breath underwater like an elephant seal.

But after spending the last year inside the University of Alberta’s Transplant Institute directing footage for not one but two separate documentaries, the Cambridge-educated scientist is awestruck.

“I think of transplant science as one of the great scientific miracles of modern times,” he says, sitting beside producer Rosvita Dransfeld at her 104 Street office. “It’s like putting a human on the moon or growing a baby in a test tube. It’s given us the power to bend the rules of life.”

Feature-length documentary Memento Mori — a reminder in Latin that we all must die — premières Thursday Nov. 10 at 7 p.m. at Garneau Theatre. 

Dransfeld underlines her curiosity: “I’m fascinated by the ability to extend lives, and to give death new meaning.”

Organ transplant science “creates a whole new moral problem for us,” says Thompson. 

“As much as this is a documentary about people who need organs, and about the fascinating techniques, really it’s about what we’re prepared to do as members of a community where we trade organs back and forth.”

Appropriately enough, the year’s worth of footage was dual-purposed to create The Nature of Things — Vital Bonds. The TV hour is an entirely different edit from Memento Mori. Narrated by David Suzuki, it’s focused on current science and the future trajectory of organ transplanting. It runs Thursday, Nov. 17 at 8 p.m. on CBC.

Both are overwhelmingly Edmonton stories, including several of the families, surgeons and settings.

CBC and the National Film Board work together less often than you might imagine; these films make the case it should happen more. This also marks the first collaboration between Thompson and Dransfeld, longtime friends as well as two of the most notable Edmonton filmmakers.

In the footage, several characters emerge in the real-life drama of life, death and second chances.

In one scene, two surgeons perform a liver transplant as Dr. James Shapiro reveals he helped with a successful liver transplant on his adjacent assistant — when the younger doctor was a 12-year-old. Meanwhile, a two-week-old baby girl awaits a new heart, flown in a cooler from thousands of kilometres away.

Then there’s 28-year-old athlete Matthew, who suffered cardiac arrest in the midst of a tattoo session — lack of oxygen for too long damaging his brain. Remarkably, his kin allowed cameras to roll the entire time as they hoped and prayed he would recover — a family at its most vulnerable. And we’re in the room as they’re given devastating news. 

What’s shown is harrowing, heartbreaking. The filmmakers are intentionally supplying packets of tissue at the screening, which will be attended by many of the documentary subjects, including Matthew’s family. Afterwards, there will be a Q&A with the filmmakers.

The two agree they made the work to inspire empathy. “We needed a film,” says Thompson, “that really showed us what it was like to be dying for want of an organ, but also to have someone you love die in front of you, and to make that decision to donate.”

Dransfeld earlier made a film about dialysis at U of A hospital, where she encountered the “dire situation” surrounding organ donation.

She considered herself corrupted in a certain sense, having opinions and potentially knowing too much to have that fresh spark of curiosity — and so hired Thompson to direct. It was a challenging step away from his usual scripted TV films, and both laugh about having Alpha personalities.

“But because of his talent and sensitivity,” explains Dransfeld, “I thought he would be the right person to do this.”

Dransfeld’s films are internationally recognized, her verité style the force behind 

Edmonton sex-trade worker documentary Who Cares, 

The Dogwalker 

and Broke, about a pawnshop in a sputtering Alberta economy.

Thompson, meanwhile, is renowned for his first-person journeys through evolutionary history, including The Perfect Runner and the jaw-dropping The Great Human Odyssey.

The new films take the best of both of their talents, Thompson stepping back and letting the captured footage do the talking, yet guiding the story with his academic understanding. 

He was looking for certain stories, and laughs “at my own arrogance” when things didn’t turn out as planned — one subject defying odds and surviving, for example.

Overall, explains Dransfeld, the crew tried to be invisible. “We did something I call low-impact filming. You’re just a fly on the wall. They never ask somebody to do something again, no extra lighting. They used sign language. It’s important for the teams to never be intrusive. You get this to a point people don’t even notice anymore the crew’s around.”

The camera and sound people were terrified of accidentally doing something that might endanger the procedures. But they handled queasiness because, Thompson notes, “they had a job to do.” Sometimes for more than 10 hours in surgery.

It should be noted, and Thompson does, “for a film about organ transplants there’s very little actual gore.”

“We had to be careful about what we showed,” he said.

We do see a damaged liver, a baby’s beating heart, a pair of lungs surprisingly lightweight. But the final edit avoided floors covered in blood.”

Thompson even test-screened the work on his wife and nine- and 10-year-old daughters.

“I think it’s almost harder for the grown-ups than children,” he admits. “It confronts your fears of mortality. Whereas of children, they’re really interested (that) these things are possible. My daughter said it was sad, but they were full of questions.”

This being said, the filmmakers wanted it to be a harrowing view.

“It’s meant to be almost too much to take — but without empathy, without understanding, how can we make informed decisions about organ donation? 

Otherwise, we have no access to that world … unless it happens to us in the end.”

fgriwkowsky@edmontonjournal.com

@fisheyefoto

PREVIEW

Memento Mori première

Where: Metro Cinema at Garneau Theatre, 8712 109 St.

When: Thursday Nov. 10 at 7 p.m., Sunday Nov. 13 at 1 p.m.

Tickets: $12 adults

https://edmontonjournal.com/entertainment/movies/edmonton-filmmakers-screen-harrowing-organ-transplant-documentary

My opinion: You can watch the full- length films here:

Edmonton sex-trade worker documentary Who Cares, 

https://www.nfb.ca/film/who_cares/#:~:text=In%20this%20cinema%20v%C3%A9rit%C3%A9%20documentary,samples%20for%20future%20postmortem%20identification.

The Dogwalker:

https://www.nfb.ca/film/dogwalker_the/

Broke:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1381730/

The Perfect Runner:

https://handfuloffilms.ca/our-films/perfect-runner/

The Great Human Odyssey:

https://handfuloffilms.ca/our-films/great-human-odyssey/

   

Apr. 21, 2017 "The stories they tell": Today I found this article by John Semley in the Globe and Mail.  This is about the documentary The Stairs: 

Just a few minutes into our conversation at Ontario Restaurant –the kind of old-school, Formica counter top diner that, in a different neighbourhood, would have been bought out and revamped to sling haute cuisine – and Marty Thompson, 55, bolts out of his chair to help a hunched, elderly woman with a walker get through the front door.

“I’ve known that lady 40 years or so, man,” he says, plopping back into his seat, “back when she still had full function of herself. Paul, the owner here? I know him. He used to go to school with my best friend’s older brother. I know ’em all, man.”

In this unassuming restaurant near Dundas and Sherbourne streets – just a few blocks from the tourist-friendly hustle-bustle of the Eaton Centre and Yonge Dundas Square – near Toronto’s rapidly changing Regent Park, everyone seems to know Thompson. He carries himself with the unarrogant confidence of a true local, radiating an Al Waxmanian charisma.

 He’s the king of Regent Park. Fellow Ontario Restaurant patrons exchange nods and waves of familiarity. Our server calls him by name. The owner shuffles over to personally hand deliver his soup du jour (tomato), joking, “One soup for Mr. Millionaire.”

“What’s that about?” I wonder. “Why did he call you Mr. Millionaire?”

“There was a shop on Queen and Parliament,” Thompson says. “Called Marty Millionaire. They sold all this old furniture and movie props. That’d been there since day one, a hundred million years.”

Marty’s no millionaire. But in Regent Park, where he’s lived since he was six years old, his local star is on the rise. He’s one of the three mains subjects profiled in The Stairs, a documentary by Toronto producer/director Hugh Gibson that premiered last year at the Toronto International Film Festival. 

The doc deals with drug abuse, the sex trade and the road to recovery in Regent Park, a neighbourhood known for its looming public-housing projects, and long stigmatized by its reputation for poverty and violence.

It’s tempting to call The Stairs “a hard look at the epidemic of drug abuse and violence.” But that feels a bit cheap. While Gibson doesn’t shy away from the realities of the local drug and sex trade, his camera lingering as users huff crack in sunken stairwells, The Stairs rarely feels exploitative, gawking or self-consciously gritty. “To me, it was more about showing an honest depiction of what their lives were like,” Gibson says. “It was important to have the community embrace it. And to have the community involved in the filmmaking process, to take ownership of their own storytelling.”

Shot over five years, The Stairs feels lived-in and intimate. Gibson explores the issues facing Regent Park locals – in addition to Thompson, the film follows a former sex worker named Roxanne Smith, and Greg Bell, a crack-cocaine user involved in a protracted legal battle against a cop accused of excessive force – through their own stories, never once deferring to dusty statistics or the “wisdom” of academics and policy makers. 

In doing so, it makes a persuasive case for the power and efficacy of harm reduction: a public-health strategy that focuses on practically minimizing the risks associated with drug use and sex work.

Beyond being the literal poster boy for The Stairs (a profile of his face appears on the film’s poster), Thompson is also a harm reduction success story. A decade ago, he was a full-blown addict, homeless, sleeping in stairwells in Regent Park’s public-housing towers. “I woke up on the stairs, Christmas morning, 2007,” he recalls. “That was the worst day of my life.”

Soon after, he heard of a program called CUP, the “Crack Users Project,” developed by the Regent Park Community Health Centre. The pitch was simple: Listen to speakers talk about addiction and recovery, make $20. For Marty, it was a no-brainer. “Twenty bucks?” he exclaims, excited by the prospect even years later. “That’s a hit of crack! That’s why I went.

After the second or third time going, I started listening to these people. … They used to do drugs. I knew they did drugs. I did ’em with them! But now they’ve gone to college, to university and stuff. I started thinking, Wow. Wow, wow, wow.”

Thompson started working with Regent Park Street Health as a peer outreach liaison: handing out clean needles, condoms, pipes, and offering assistance and training in the neighbourhood. 

Soon he had his own apartment, a cute cat and money in his pocket. 

“I wanted to prove to the peers, and mainly to myself, that I can do this,” he says. 

“And that they can do it, too. But you can’t keep talkin’, talkin’, talkin’. You gotta do it.”

In spring of 2011, filmmaker Gibson was contracted by Regent Park Health Centre to produce two educational videos on harm reduction strategies. “The idea was to make something they could show to their funders,” Gibson explains. 

“Their funding was threatened. The climate was very different. This was the Stephen Harper-era, the Rob Ford-era. It was not pro-harm reduction.”

In 2012, Gibson met with Street Health and members of the community to discuss the idea of making a feature-length film about the area. While everyone was on board, some people worried that a film about the realities of life in Regent Park might be too downbeat. 

As Gibson remembers, someone at the meeting asked how they could make sure the movie had a happy ending, to which another local responded, “Well, that depends on us.”

It’s an ethos that defines The Stairs as much as the holistic public-health approach to harm reduction. 

It’s about arming people with the tools and the knowledge to keep themselves and their peers safe. 

It’s about taking an active, evidence-based approach to community safety and betterment. 

And at an even more fundamental level, it’s about the rights and dignity of drug users, sex workers, the mentally ill, the homeless and others cast to society’s, and the city’s, margins. For Gibson, it’s about “humanizing that which has been dehumanized.”

For his part, Marty Thompson hopes The Stairs will drum up neighbourhood excitement for more than just his own star quality. Despite his exuberant charm and outsized personality, he maintains that he normally shies away from attention. “I don’t like being the centre of attention,” he says, and it’s a little hard to believe.

“But in this case, I loved it. It got the word out there about drug users and the homeless and the mentally ill – that they’re people, too, and should be treated with the same respect.”

The Stairs opens at Vancouver’s VIFF Vancity April 21. Hugh Gibson will participate in after-show interviews April 21-25.

https://www.pressreader.com/canada/the-globe-and-mail-ottawaquebec-edition/20170421/282278140212287

My opinion: I like both articles about these documentaries because they're both entertaining and educating people about important subjects like organ donations, homelessness, drug and alcohol addiction.

This week's theme is about filmmaking:

"Credits roll for Edmonton Film Society after 80 years"/ "Nominees revealed for annual Edmonton film, music prizes"

http://badcb.blogspot.com/2020/06/filmmaking-edmonton-film-prize-post.html

"A Canadian invasion at Sundance"/ "Birdland is less a gumshoe story, than it is a psychological portrait"

http://badcb.blogspot.com/2023/10/a-canadian-invasion-at-sundance.html

Fri. Oct. 6, 2023 "Canada's grocers want to squash competition as quickly as possible: expert": Today I found this article by Iva Poshnjari on BNN Bloomberg:

Rising food costs in Canada have prompted the federal government to demand change from the country’s leading grocers – but an expert in the industry says plans announced from Ottawa this week won’t bring quick relief from high grocery bills.

 
Sylvain Charlebois, director of the Agri-Food Analytics Lab at Dalhousie University, told BNN Bloomberg on Friday that Ottawa’s measures to bring down food prices will take time to implement. 
 
“For the short-term if you’re looking for help from Ottawa, you’re likely going to be very disappointed,” he said in a television interview.
 
Charlebois said Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne has taken some steps by pushing grocers to discount items and reforming Canada’s competition laws to create more change. But he argued that the minister could have done more to implement immediate change, for example, by cutting taxes on food items.
 
“Grocers actually give back to Ottawa anywhere between $300 million to $1 billion in taxes, and that money comes from consumers, so he could have actually helped consumers right away,” Charlebois said. 
 
He also pointed to the sector’s competition challenges that will take time to work through. 
 
“When you actually look at the grocers we have in Canada, these companies are well run, they are well managed,” he said. “They understand competition and they want to squash completion as quickly as possible.”
 
This oligopoly-type landscape makes it extremely challenging for new players to enter the Canadian market and help with pricing, Charlebois added
 
“We need a stronger Competition Bureau to oversee some of these issues,” he said.

https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/canada-s-grocers-want-to-squash-competition-as-quickly-as-possible-expert-1.1981394

Sims Lifecycle Services: I got these 2 plastic bags with my flip phone back in 2010.  You can recycle your phone by sending to them.  It says "Recycle your cell phone for your local food bank."

I recycled 1 in 2018 and now will recycle another this year.

https://www.simslifecycle.com/

Oct. 10, 2023 "Urgent Petition: Expedite Work Permit Issuance for Iranian Families in Canada": I signed this petition and put this on my Facebook page:

Why this petition matters

Started by Morteza Homapour

1: Iranian families residing in Canada are directly impacted by the prolonged processing time for work permit issuance, resulting in heartbreaking separations within their families. In some cases, one spouse is already in Canada, waiting for the work permit, while the other remains in Iran. Similarly, some children are forced to remain in Iran while their parents await the necessary documentation in Canada. These family separations inflict immense emotional strain and disrupt the stability and well-being of the affected individuals.

2: The stakes are incredibly high, not only for the educational rights of the children but also for the unity and cohesiveness of these families. The current situation creates significant emotional distress, as loved ones are torn apart, unsure when they will be reunited. The continued delay in work permit issuance exacerbates the strain on family relationships and prevents the establishment of a supportive and nurturing environment for children. If left unresolved, these separations can have long-lasting negative effects on the mental health and overall well-being of both parents and children.

3: The urgency for immediate action is heightened by the fact that these families are enduring unimaginable hardships due to the prolonged processing time. Every day counts in bringing these families back together and providing the stability they desperately need. By expediting the issuance of work permits, the Government of Canada can alleviate the emotional burden on these families, promoting their reunification and allowing them to rebuild their lives as a cohesive unit. Acting promptly will not only demonstrate compassion and empathy but also uphold the principles of family unity and human rights that Canada stands for.

https://www.change.org/p/title-urgent-petition-expedite-work-permit-issuance-for-iranian-families-in-canada?recruiter=253666986&utm_source=share_petition&utm_medium=facebook&utm_campaign=psf_combo_share_initial&utm_term=15f677c3ffbf40f0bfe86055de885c0d&recruited_by_id=52d62460-c9ca-11e4-b0c1-cd0aa2c1a32c&share_bandit_exp=initial-36861827-en-CA&utm_content=fht-36861827-en-ca%3Acv_55508

Sun. Oct. 7, 2023 Nancy Drew: I finished watching this series.  I watched the last season in a couple of weeks.  This is a solid show with the supernatural and solving mysteries:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10313176/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_8_nm_0_q_nancy%2520drew

Fall: This was on my friend Tam's Facebook page.  Appreciate the fall season.

Mon. Oct. 9, 2023 Warm weather: I was able to sit outside in my lawn chair on the weekend.

Thanksgiving: Last night we had roast beef, some carrots, celery, and onions baked together.  There were baked potatoes and gravy.

West Edmonton Mall: My parents and Grandma went there to buy groceries at T&T.  I went shopping.  We were there 10- 11:30am.

1. I got a free coffee at McDonald's with my coffee card.  It's mainly my dad who buys the coffees and I put the stickers on them.

2. Nike will be opening where Forever 21 was.  There's already Sportchek and Foot Locker at the mall.

3. Urban Outfitters: I tried the perfume.

4. Bath and Body Works: I tried the perfume and fragrance mists.

5. Lazio closed down.

6. Second Cup replaced Lazio.

Oct. 10, 2023 TV poll: This is from Leo opinion.  

Brenda M. from Saskatoon, SK, would like to know:

Do you prefer to binge-watch a TV series one season at a time, an episode a week, or once it is over?

Binge watch a season at a time 43.43% (1875)

One episode per week 27.36% (1181)

Once the TV series is complete/over 21.64% (934)

Not applicable 7.57% (327)

My opinion: Binge watch a season at a time, mainly for a new show.  Or at least 3 episodes of one show.  I watch 1 episode a day.

Oct. 11, 2023 Hot Topic/ BoxLunch:

On October 14, 2015, Hot Topic launched BoxLunch, a gift and novelty retail store.^[22] For every $10 spent, a meal is donated to a person in need.^[23]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_Topic