In the picture-postcard community of North Vancouver, filmmaker Murray Siple follows men who have turned bottle-picking, their primary source of income, into the extreme sport of shopping cart racing. Enduring hardships from everyday life on the streets of Vancouver, this sub-culture depicts street life as much more than stereotypes portrayed in mainstream media. The films takes a deep look into the lives of the men who race carts, the adversity they face, and the appeal of cart racing despite the risk.
Related Movies
The Street (1996)
Every day, on the streets of Canada's cities, we pass them on our way to work or school. Bums, beggars, winos, bag people we call them. But who is the person at the end of that outstretched arm? What is life on the street really like? Is there a way off the street? For six years, director Daniel Cross followed the lives of three homeless men who spent much of their time in and around a Montreal subway station. Filmed in a cinema verité style, the film is unique: it humanizes the homeless, breaking down the barrier between us and them, neither moralizing nor offering easy answers. This is a gritty, compelling look at life on the streets that moves beyond the media stereotypes to show both the humanity of the homeless and the street-toughened aspects of their existence.
Tadpoles: The Big Little Migration (2020)
Short documentary, shot over fours years, showing the incredible daily migration of the western toad tadpoles, a designated indicator species on Vancouver Island, British Columbia.
Haida Modern (2019)
In the 50 years since he carved his first totem pole, Robert Davidson has come to be regarded as one of the world’s foremost modern artists. Charles Wilkinson (Haida Gwaii: On the Edge of the World) brings his trademark inquisitiveness and craftsmanship to this revealing portrait of an unassuming living legend. Weaving together engaging interviews with the artist, his offspring, and a host of admirers, Haida Modern extols the sweeping impact of both Davidson’s artwork and the legions it’s inspired.
Nightcrawlers (2019)
For five years, Stephen McCoy documented street life in Boston. This is what he captured.
Someone's Daughter, Someone's Son (2024)
Now a successful filmmaker, Lorna Tucker was once a teenage runaway sleeping rough on the streets of London. For this frank, forceful and inspiring documentary, she returns to her former haunts and speaks to current and former homeless people about why, twenty-five years later, record numbers of people are still reduced to living on Britain's streets.
Tell Them We Were Here (2021)
Tell Them We Were Here is an inspirational feature-length documentary about eight artists who show us why art is vital to a healthy society and reminds us that we are stronger together.
Streetwise (1984)
This documentary about teenagers living on the streets in Seattle began as a magazine article. The film follows nine teenagers who discuss how they live by panhandling, prostitution, and petty theft.
Canadian Pacific I (1974)
Canadian Pacific I is made up of a series of slowly dissolved shots done from the same framing over several months. The camera frames a window with a railway yard in the foreground, a bay in the space behind it, and misty mountains in the extreme distance. Trains occasionally pass by in the foreground. Huge ships move across the bay. Blue mists hover over the mountain heads.
Canadian Pacific II (1975)
Canadian Pacific II is designed as a companion piece to Canadian Pacific I. Shot from a window two storeys higher and in the building adjacent to the artists’s studio of the previous year, one enters into a dream state… an involvement with a vocabulary of seeing and feeling by subtle transitions of the passage of time
Dark Days (2000)
A cinematic portrait of the homeless population who live permanently in the underground tunnels of New York City.
What You’ll Remember (2021)
Homelessness in the United States takes many forms. For Elizabeth Herrera, David Lima and their four children, housing instability has meant moving between unsafe apartments, motels, relatives’ couches, shelters, the streets and their car. After 15 years of this uncertainty, the family moved into their first stable housing — an apartment in the San Francisco Bay Area — in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic.
Everything Will Be (2014)
Sundance award-winning director Julia Kwan’s documentary Everything Will Be captures the subtle nuances of a culturally diverse neighbourhood—Vancouver’s once thriving Chinatown—in the midst of transformation. The community’s oldest and newest members offer their intimate perspectives on the shifting landscape as they reflect on change, memory and legacy. Night and day, a neon sign that reads "EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE ALRIGHT" looms over Chinatown. Everything is going to be alright, indeed, but the big question is for whom?
Vancouver: No Fixed Address (2017)
There is no topic that unites all of Vancouver quite like that of housing. At every dinner party, social gathering, or chance meeting in the street, everyone has an opinion, and they want to share it. Charles Wilkinson’s new film Vancouver: No Fixed Address tackles the subject from a multiplicity of perspectives. A chorus of voices chime in — everyone from David Suzuki, to Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson, Seth Klein, Condo King Bob Rennie, Senator Yuen Pau Woo, and lots of regular Vancouver citizens.
Living in Tents (2018)
In January 2011 Paul Crane discovered a tent city in downtown St. Louis, along the Mississippi River. He was curious as to who these people were, how they ended up there, and what life was like for them each day. He initially thought he would simply go down during the day and capture footage when possible, but he quickly realized that if he wanted to truly capture how these people lived and the full reality of their collective and individual existence, he would have to be there full time and become a part of the place, so he moved in with them.
Beyond Gay: The Politics of Pride (2010)
Over the course of a year, film follows Vancouver Pride Society president Ken Coolen to various international Pride events, including Poland, Hungary, Russia, Sri Lanka and others where there is great opposition to pride parades. In North America, Pride is complicated by commercialization and a sense that the festivals are turning away from their political roots toward tourism, party promotion and entertainment. Christie documents the ways larger, more mainstream Pride events have supported the global Pride movement and how human rights components are being added to more established events. In the New York sequence, leaders organize an alternative Pride parade, the Drag March, set up to protest the corporatization of New York Pride. A parade in São Paulo, the world's largest Pride festival, itself includes a completely empty float, meant to symbolize all those lost to HIV and to anti-gay violence.
Hotel 22 (2014)
Each night in Silicon Valley, the Line 22 transforms from a public city bus into an unofficial shelter for the homeless in one of the richest parts of the world.
Outside (2018)
The film explores the turbulent lives of homeless persons in Cologne, Germany. Through their personal belongings the homeless share with the viewer their memories and emotions, and provide insight into the secrets of survival on the street.
The Oasis (2008)
Tough kids from tough backgrounds living dangerous lives - these are the young people of the Oasis, a grimy brick youth refuge in inner-city Sydney. No story is too horrific, no circumstance too dire, no kid too damaged for its tireless director, Captain Paul Moulds. Father figure, counselor, saviour and an orphan himself, Paul is nothing short of a legend amongst those who stumble in at breaking point with nowhere left to go. This raw observational documentary filmed over two years captures Paul's daily battle to save these lost children of the so-called "Lucky Country".
