By Valerie Proctor and Juliet O’Neill
A man sits on a bench gazing at the open sky over the icy Ottawa River, a bottle of beer wedged in the snow by his feet. As fine music soars, the camera pulls back to show Parliament Hill behind him. It looks like the world might be his oyster, but the reality is dramatically different.
In fact, he’s one of the many street people who struggle to survive the frigid Ottawa winters in the neighbourhoods of Lowertown and Vanier. The bench is one of his safe spots.
He looks tough. But Stephen R. Coleman, the director of the documentary film Project Cold Days, invites us to get to know this man and other street people so well that their humanity shines through. That is the aim of the film. Coleman goes deep and doesn’t hurry his subjects.
The original musical score, composed by Benjamin Wright, is intended to amplify the narrative and contains such tracks as “Shooting Up” and “Hopeful”. Coleman said he was inspired by the belief that everyone has the “desire to love and be loved, to not be abandoned, to not be left alone in the cold.”
Producer Sterlin Fernando, a Lowertown resident, got involved when Coleman put out a call for volunteers. “I wanted to do some good in the world and try to make a difference,” he said in a clip for the 2020 Ottawa Canadian Film Festival. “Especially now,” he added, “it’s great to have stories of resilience and triumph of the human spirit.”
Coleman and Fernando won the confidence of their subjects, capturing a close-up look at the pain and loneliness of their harsh lives, facing challenges of depression, addiction, and trauma. The youngest and most articulate of them, Zack Fairbairn, explains how, although he was a good student, he got into drugs when he was depressed and developed an opioid addiction. After he tragically died two years ago at age 28, the filmmakers released a segment on their Facebook page, saying Fairbairn was “one of the most beautifully heartbreaking stories we heard on the streets.”
The film also introduces community workers from such organizations as the Shepherds of Good Hope, The Mission, The Salvation Army and Ottawa Inner City Health, who operate in the streets, contending with major difficulties: lack of funds and affordable housing, and people with severe mental health and other problems.
An iconic scene in the film is an older man pushing his belongings and his dog in a grocery cart, fitted with an umbrella, through the winter streets. But it is not all dire; some of the people in the film have recovered and found housing since they were filmed.
Coleman doesn’t sugar-coat the reality or offer solutions or advice beyond greeting street people kindly. He has called film an art that is “a powerful method to educate and inspire.”
The film isn’t easy to watch. It moves slowly. Cold exudes from almost every frame. At points the Ottawa architecture looks bleak and rejecting. The film makers say the 75-minute documentary was crafted from 100 hours of film.
Project Cold Days is so powerful that it should be seen by every legislator in the country and distributed widely in theatres, schools, community centres, NGOs and government offices, as well as film festivals.
A 44-minute version of the film has been shown several times on CBC in the last couple of years, and the documentary was featured at the Ottawa Canadian Film Festival in November 2020. The filmmakers are searching for a distributor for an international audience. Project Cold Days should not be allowed to sit on the shelf.