Vancouver cannabis culture lights up the festival
Films about marijuana are challenging viewers’ thoughts about the politics behind the drug.
Jodie Emery is the wife of Marc Emery who is one of “Vancouver’s 3″ (aka “BC3″) that faces potential deportation to the U.S., for selling marijuana seeds to American residents.
One of the photos I took at the pro-Marijuana rally outside City Hall in Calgary, Alberta on Saturday, September 15, 2007.
Photo from http://flickr.com/photos/thivierr/1393208686/
Nick Wilson was 26, developing a documentary – his first – about online infidelity, when he had a conversation with his 68-year-old aunt that sent him in a new direction. Aunt Wendy had seen a news story on TV about the Vancouver marijuana activist Marc Emery and she was incensed. Why were U.S. authorities after him? And why would Canada even consider extraditing a Canadian to face up to life in prison, simply for selling marijuana seeds?
“She hates potheads, hates drugs, has no patience for any of it, calls them layabouts and bums,” Wilson said at a Vancouver coffee shop this week, “but she saw that story … and she was on Mark’s side.”
Wilson switched gears; this was a story he wanted to tell.
The result, The Prince of Pot: The US vs. Marc Emery, is one of three Canadian films at this year’s Vancouver International Film Festival focusing on marijuana and asking audiences to rethink its illegality.
If it feels like a cliché to have films about pot at a film festival in Vancouver, so be it. Wilson, now 27, wanted his film to have its world premiere in Vancouver, because of what he calls the city’s cannabis culture. “It’s very visible,” he says. “It’s like being gay in San Francisco.”
Besides, he says, “Vancouver is the town [Emery] picked to do battle in. It’s kind of the front line.”
Emery, 49, has been lobbying for the decriminalization of marijuana for years. He heads the B.C. Marijuana Party, runs a magazine called Cannabis Culture, has a website called pot-tv.net and operates a mail-order marijuana-seed distribution business.
In 2005, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration asked Canada to extradite Emery and two of his employees to face drug-trafficking charges for sending seeds south of the border. Vancouver Police moved in and arrested him.
And it was that fact – the co-operation of a Canadian police force with American anti-drug forces – that drew Wilson in. “Emery is a symptom of a much bigger issue, which is Canadian sovereignty,” Wilson says. “Who’s setting our priorities? Is it us or is it the Americans?”
Wilson was in no way motivated to make this film by a personal desire to decriminalize marijuana. He is a very occasional pot smoker, who, after following Emery’s fight, now believes it should be decriminalized, but who gave the matter very little thought before making the film.
Burnaby, B.C., director Brett Harvey doesn’t smoke much pot either. But audiences might be led to think otherwise after watching his first film The Union: The Business Behind Getting High. The feature-length documentary offers argument after argument in favour of decriminalizing marijuana. At its heart is the thesis that there are big business forces at work – ranging from pharmaceutical giants to prison-guard unions – fighting to keep pot illegal. The people who run grow-ops and sell pot in the vast underground market don’t want it legalized either. Drug traffickers and Drug Enforcement Administration agents may make strange bedfellows, but this is the world, the film argues, that criminalizing pot creates.
The Prince of Pot screens this Monday, Friday and Oct. 8 at VIFF and airs on CBC Newsworld on Oct. 23. The Union screens at VIFF on Oct. 10 and 11. Weirdsville screens at VIFF tomorrow and Tuesday and opens in four Canadian cities on Oct. 12.
