Part of New Adventures in Nonfiction (2018) & New Adventures in Nonfiction
Sunday, April 15, 2018, 6:30 p.m.
Museum of the Moving Image - Bartos Screening Room

With director Hugh Gibson, Daniel Raymond, Deputy Director of Policy and Planning at the Harm Reduction Coalition, and Liz Evans, Executive Director, New York Harm Reduction Educators and Washington Heights Corner Project, and Co-Founder of Insite

Dir. Hugh Gibson. 2016, 95 mins. Digital projection. Hugh Gibson's award-winning documentary takes us inside Toronto's Regent Park Community Health Center, and introduces a staff of social workers that includes both former and current drug users. The Stairs tells the story of Marty, Greg, and Roxanne, who each survived decades of street-involvement, using their experiences to help others while struggling to maintain their own stability. Told over five years, and persistently and nimbly captured on a variety of video formats, The Stairs is an unflinchingly honest, frequently entertaining, stereotype-defying study of life on society’s margins. "The Stairs isn’t a social worker’s manifesto or a recruitment ad; rather, it’s a serious effort to reckon with harm reduction as a storytelling strategy—a way of thinking about addicts, whether currently using or sober, as people with still-evolving narrative trajectories and voices worth hearing."—Angelo Muredda, Cinema Scope.