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Reviews
Streets of Plenty (2010)
A fascinating real life experiment
As someone who arrived in Vancouver as an immigrant more than 30 years ago, I often wondered how so many people end up living on the streets of our beautiful city. From my own experience I know that lack of money, language skills and having no family and friends doesn't destin one for a life on the streets but, as this film pointed out, addiction or mental illness definitely does. It's a reality which Alex's experiment successfully highlighted. Addiction is an extremely complex problem for which we are quite obviously failing to find a solution considering this film is more than 10 years old. Unfortunately, although this film offered a lot of questions it didn't attempt to look for any answers or solutions. Alex had a unique opportunity to find out what insights those living this incredibly uncomfortable life could offer to us regular folks with a roof over our heads. Other than, "don't get addicted", there wasn't much content obtained from the homeless. Too bad because the only way to help them would be to understand them better. Still, a fascinating experiment which I felt compelled to watch until the very end.