| In February of 2000, Phillip Wong used a gun to take his own life in his father’s Saint Paul, Alberta home. The 36-year-old father of twins left no note, but he did leave a lot of questions regarding the circumstances that led up to his death.
His younger sister, Calgary filmmaker Michelle Wong, took it upon herself to try and find some reasons for her brother’s suicide. The result is a stunningly honest documentary film called Pieces of a Dream – a Story of Gambling.
Making its debut Thursday, January 29 on CBC Newsworld, Pieces of a Dream recounts the events of Phillip’s life, including his mother’s decision to leave her husband and three children for a new life with a new man while Phillip was still in high school. Later, in his second year of university, Phillip would suddenly quit school to join his mother and her new husband in Las Vegas. There, he would become a husband, a dad and a man with some solid entrepreneurial skills. Vegas is also where he cultivated a gambling habit that would ultimately cost him far more than just money.
Pieces of a Dream is a film that doesn’t attempt to vindicate or condemn Phillip for his desperate descent into a world of compulsive gambling. Neither does it seek to blame the big Vegas casinos or our VLT-laden province for his affliction. It simply tells his story and leaves the viewer to draw his or her own conclusions from it.
It is a triumph of raw storytelling with an unusual origin.
"This may sound sort of fantastic," Michelle recalls, "but about four weeks after my brother’s death, I went to see a local psychic."
During one part of the session, the psychic said, "If there is anything you should walk away with from this reading it is that your brother wants you to do a film about his life."
Later, Michelle would discover a letter in Phillip’s personal effects indicating his secret involvement in drug dealing and serious money problems. Added together, these two events confirmed to Michelle that her brother’s tale was something that needed to be told.
Michelle’s inquiries while shooting the documentary would lead her to a startling conclusion about Phillip. "He kind of had this Jekyll-and-Hyde experience," she says. "That’s what I try to convey in the film – that people are people and then, when their addiction hits them, they get into this frenzy and they almost become someone else. They do things they normally wouldn’t do."
In Phillip’s case, a seemingly happy-go-lucky, charismatic and popular guy became capable of beating and terrorizing his wife, making threats to his mother and even shooting a man.
The arduous and often emotionally difficult process of making Pieces of a Dream has had its personal rewards for Michelle.
"It changed my life," she confesses. "I grew up in ways I didn’t think would happen. My family dynamic has changed. I am very close to my mother and father now, and I think they respect me a lot more.
"It was worth it," she concludes. "There was a lot of pain, but it was worth it."
Pieces of a Dream airs on CBC Newsworld’s Rough Cuts on Thursday, January 29 at 8 and 11 p.m.
ARCTIC MISSION
"Even in spite of the evidence I remain optimistic that we will make the changes in our lifestyle required here in the south, to ease the creation of problems in the North."
With that statement, veteran Canadian documentary filmmaker Caroline Underwood puts a positive spin on the seemingly devastating effects of global warming on the Arctic.
It’s a concern she is quite familiar with. Her film Lords of the Arctic takes an in-depth look at the consequences of climate change on northern wildlife. The documentary makes up Part 2 of Arctic Mission, a five-part National Film Board series coming to CBC’s The Nature of Things. The series takes a wide-ranging, multi-angled approach to examining global warming’s impact on a very delicately balanced part of this planet.
The Arctic Mission broadcasts begin with the première of The Great Adventure, a film that tracks a five-month ocean journey through the legendary Northwest Passage.
Underwood, whose own film features captivating footage of bowhead whales, huge flocks of thick-billed murres and caribou racing along long stretches of open ice, is proud of the Arctic Mission anthology as a whole. "Each film is different and each director has had the creative licence to make their own film. It makes this quite a unique series," she says.
Underwood also feels it’s a project of uncommon grandeur for Canada.
"For me, it was just an incredible opportunity to be able to work on a project of this scale," she says. "We are used to seeing this kind of thing come out of places like the BBC or National Geographic, who have millions upon millions to spend. I think it’s a real testament to Canada, that we’ve been able to do this project about a very important subject."
Arctic Mission runs for five consecutive weeks on CBC’s The Nature of Things with David Suzuki, beginning on Wednesday, January 28 at 7 p.m. |
Copyright ©2004 FFWD. All rights reserved.