Sat May 26 | 7:30 pm | PC

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Director: Morgan Matthews, United Kingdom, 2005, 90 minutes

Taking its title from the T-shirt slogan “Rehab is for quitters,” Matthews’ unpretentious film looks inside Phoenix House, a South London treatment centre for drug addicts, many of them sent by the courts as an alternative to prison.

In a subject familiar to Vancouverites, this British documentary explores the issue of drug addiction, and in particular a strategy the UK has implemented in an attempt to address the problem. Should repeat offenders who happen to be addicted to drugs be locked up or given the chance to reform? By significantly increasing funding, the British Government has given a clear signal that it believes rehabilitation is the answer.

Phoenix House is a residential treatment centre that offers people who use drugs the chance to change their lives through a six-month program. Some people arrive there voluntarily and are destitute and looking for help; others have been sent by the court system and will face lengthy prison sentences should they fail to complete the program. The hero of the film is Jimmy, one of the centre’s counsellors, whose first experience of the programme he now runs was as one of its beneficiaries – he was the subject of a 1996 film about heroin addiction.

With unique and intimate access to the therapeutic process, this moving film follows a number of the residents of Phoenix House on an intensely personal journey over the course of their six months in a treatment program that could literally save their lives.

Preceded by:

Mother

Director: Christoph Steger, United Kingdom, 2006, 7 minutes
“Mother” is an undertaker with a loud voice, an expressionless face and huge square glasses. This endearing animated short film documents her story as she poignantly but directly explains, with no frills or small talk, how she feels about her career as an undertaker who lives above her funeral parlour.