Vancouver: No Fixed Address, Vancity Theatre, May 19-June 8. Tonight: Panel discussion with Charles Wilkinson (filmmaker), Judy Graves, longtime advocate for Vancouver’s homeless, Fayyaz Alimohamed, London School of Economics trained economist, and moderator Stephen Quinn (CBC). May 20: Filmmaker Q&A. May 25: Panel discussion with Wilkinson, Sam Cooper, journalist, and Samantha Gambling, co-founder of the BC Tiny House Collective. For more information visit viff.org.
How does a routine trip to the dentist turn into a casual conversation on real estate?
If you’re from Vancouver, where most chit-chats feel as if housing is mere moments away from coming up, it wouldn’t be an out of the ordinary occurrence. In Charles Wilkinson’s new film, Vancouver: No Fixed Address, it’s the whole conversation.
“You can’t get away from the discussion,” Wilkinson explains. “There’s a scene in the movie where my dental hygienist is cleaning my teeth and she starts telling me her story and that actually happened.”
The documentary had its premiere at Toronto’s Hot Docs film festival earlier this month, followed by a Vancouver showing May 6 at the DOXA film festival.
The film, which is filled with a chorus of voices and experts weighing in on Vancouver’s overheated housing market, was a long-time coming for Wilkinson and his team, who had been planning to make a Vancouver-themed film for a number of years.
“We just all of us noticed that life in Vancouver had been the same for a very long time and then it had just suddenly changed,” Wilkinson says.
He knew the time was right.
No Fixed Address features in-depth interviews with First Nations, prominent investigative journalists, Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson, David Suzuki, “condo king” Bob Rennie, and a slew of everyday Vancouver citizens, all of whom take a hard look at what has happened in the city and attempt to hash out what’s to be done for those that still call this place home.
Wilkinson, who has lived in Deep Cove for over 30 years, says the changing nature of home and community due to the Vancouver-area’s housing crisis constitutes a “serious social issue.”
His film attempts to take a balanced look at the many facets of the issue, such as the role of government, the spectre of offshore wealth, and the angst felt by millennials and lower-income individuals alike who feel burned by the market.
“What we decided to do was take the issues that people discuss … cut them up into those sections and then find people who are extremely well-informed on those subjects – who have data, who made a life’s work on studying this kind of thing – and ask them what the actual truth of the situation in each of these instances is,” Wilkinson says.
When he started making the film, he says his preconception was that Vancouver’s hot market was a result of people moving here because of its much-touted desirability and beauty – and in the process housing prices were shooting to unattainable heights.
However, based on his research with experts and prominent interview subjects, it became clear that it had more to do with unaccounted money flowing into Vancouver rather than people moving here to be part of the city.
“We have a reputation in the world now as being one of the largest money laundering centres on the planet,” he explains. “Our city is changing in an extremely dramatic manner that has not been debated at any kind of official level or been voted upon.”
While No Fixed Address pays attention to the various social and economic causes that have led to the housing crisis, it’s just as concerned with what the crisis is leaving in its wake: mainly, communities that are starting to hollow out.
The film traces everyday people cashing-in on their highly valuable housing stock as well as those who are being left in the dust, such as Maurice, a pensioner living in a van along Spanish Banks.
Near the end of Maurice’s segment he talks about wanting to move to Mexico for the winter months because the cost of living there would be substantially cheaper.
“It’s pretty tragic, really, when 30 to 40 per cent of people talking to pollsters tell them that they’re definitely moving away from the Vancouver area because they don’t feel that they can make it, it’s not for them anymore,” Wilkinson says.
The film addresses the need to level the playing field in order to give a fair shot to people who still want Vancouver to retain its diverse communities. “Right now the playing field is very much skewed in favour of local and especially international real estate speculators,” he says.
No Fixed Address is Wilkinson’s fifth documentary. His previous films, Haida Gwaii: On the Edge of the World and Oil Sands Karaoke, both explored environmental exploitation and the ways in which people reacted and adapted to those new realities.
He says at first he didn’t think there was a through-line with the films he was making, but then he realized that No Fixed Address was an environmental film as well.
“We’ve made this series of environmental films about how remote areas are under threat from commercial overexploitation,” he explains. “Vancouver: No Fixed Address is an environmental film, it’s about the environment of the city and the threats that are facing it.”
Wilkinson is preparing for his film’s limited release tonight at Vancity Theatre. While the film’s relevance for a Vancouver audiences is clear, he was taken aback by the attention it got when it debuted in Toronto earlier this month.
When he told attending audiences and press that his film was largely a story about what Vancouver did wrong and what Toronto still had the chance to do right, suddenly all eyes were on him.
“They’re going through the exact same thing,” he says.
While it has been a challenge for Vancouverites to adapt to the new housing reality here, Wilkinson insists there’s hope. He’s confident his film can help keep the conversation going.
He encourages people to make their voices heard and to be engaged with the issue of housing in the Vancouver area.
“What we’re seeing is that people, I think, are gradually beginning to understand that it’s in their hands,” he says.
