No one ends his first day living in poverty wearing a three-piece suit.
Except for Misha Kleider, an inquisitive and opinionated Vancouverite who played guinea pig for 30 days in Streets of Plenty, a documentary on navigating the social services network while surviving life on the desperate streets of the Downtown Eastside.
The film begins, as many narratives on homelessness do, with Kleider alone, wet and wearing next-to-nothing while roaming downtown Vancouver in hopes of finding someone who can assist him to shelter.
When Kleider finds cover he’s given meals, a spiffy wardrobe along with a host of amenities such as a gym membership. The film, a mash-up where Super Size Me meets homelessness, quickly moves to a cheeky critique on spending for social programs and how easily they can be accessed.
"Misha did have opinions going in,” said director Corey Ogilvie. “Interestingly, his opinions weren't sympathetic left-wing bleeding heart liberal opinions which a lot of ethnographers would have going in.
“They would want to see how hard it is. They want to go see the constraints, the socio-economic variables of marginalization and all of these things.
“But, Misha went in completely the opposite, thinking these people are scamming the system. They're living the easy life.”
The life may seem easy but Kleider soon shows, quite graphically as he painfully struggled through a case of gastroenteritis, handouts do little for homeless who are suffering from addiction exacerbated by physical and mental illness.
"All it takes is one stroke of bad luck and you can be thrust into a shit-mix of chaos of where there's disease, of where there's violence of where there's drugs and that's effectively what happened," Ogilvie said.
The plot does thicken as Kleider and crew push themselves to find the pulse driving people to pavement day in and day out. As days turned to weeks, Ogilvie who partnered with Kleider and his brother Alex would continue to push their boundaries by panhandling and dumpster diving while recording first hand accounts from people on the streets.
“The interesting thing is on the streets is friendships don’t last,” Ogilvie said. “Friendships are as quick as a blink. You can be best friends with a guy shooting up, getting high, but as soon as you come down if that guy has an idea of where to get money and you don’t, you don’t know each other.”
Filled with fair-weather friends, the open-air drug market, which fuels frenetic activity in the Downtown Eastside, quickly became apparent to Ogilvie as the last stop in Streets of Plenty.
On an typical winter night Ogilvie joined Kleider who would do the extraordinary by smoking crack cocaine in an alley surrounded by dozens of other users. When the courage from the crack kicked in Kleider would decide to shoot heroin at Insite for the first time in his life.
The experience, said Ogilvie, revealed the true cause of homelessness.
“We believe that addiction is an existential threat,” Ogilvie said. “It’s something you can’t solve with money. You can throw $45 billion at the DTES and you’re not going to end addiction.
“You can’t solve it with policy. You can’t solve it with social services. Our point is that you can solve it within yourself. We think it’s an individual choice and some people just won’t be able to get out.”
But much-needed services, which offer hope of escaping the streets, were consumed to produce Streets of Plenty.
“For us it was a question of the greater good,” Ogilvie said. “Yes, we did withhold services by using them but on the flip side 8,000 people have watched the video fully in just about a month. We’ve honestly opened an issue that nobody else has ever really done.”