[V]ermont filmmaker Bess O’Brien figured she was finished with her drug-abuse documentary “The Hungry Heart” after she completed editing the film just before the St. Albans premiere in September 2013. Then the movie started conversations from Burlington to Bennington during a Green Mountain tour that fall, and Gov. Peter Shumlin touted it in his State of the State address, drawing national press attention that winter.
Two years later, O’Brien is still on the road for a series of East Coast screenings, and the up close and personal documentary about opiate addiction, which just won the American Society of Addiction Medicine’s 2015 Media Award, has taken on a life of its own.
For O’Brien, that’s both good and bad news.
“The original 37-town tour, the fact the governor saw the film, my 15 minutes of resulting fame — all those things came together to raise the level of consciousness to a whole other level,” the Northeast Kingdom resident said this month before a presentation at Marlboro College. “It’s a snowball effect, and it’s continuing to roll.”
O’Brien wasn’t expecting her movie to spark coverage from the New York Times, ABC News (“a cry for help from Vermont, of all places,” anchor Diane Sawyer began her report) and other media outlets reaching as far across the globe as Germany, Norway and Al Jazeera television.
“I feel great that the film can help people and communities impacted by addiction come together and figure out what to do,” O’Brien says.
But the fact the documentary has spurred 200 public screenings and DVD sales to hundreds of schools, libraries, hospitals and social agencies also confirms its subject matter remains a problem.
“Unfortunately, this issue of addiction is not going away,” the filmmaker says. “It’s a challenge everywhere.”
O’Brien laments recent headlines reporting Vermont court and human service workers overwhelmed by a growing number of cases involving opiate-addicted parents — including one who allegedly shot and killed three relatives in Berlin and a Department for Children and Families worker in Barre last month.
“Addiction is just the tip of the iceberg — there are all these support systems that need to be there,” O’Brien says. “I could do a movie about housing and job availability and education and mental health … It can all feel very overwhelming.”
Back in 2011, O’Brien simply wanted to share the story of now retired St. Albans pediatrician Fred Holmes and a dozen of his 150 teenage and 20-something patients wrestling with addiction to prescription painkillers with such brand names as Vicodin and OxyContin.
Holmes, a local medical mainstay for four decades, surprised many when he became the only pediatrician in the state to invite select former patients to try Suboxone, a medication that helps reduce other drug cravings and withdrawal symptoms. Then he invited the filmmaker — who works with her husband, fellow director Jay Craven, under the banner of Kingdom County Productions — to chronicle it all.
Given rare private access, O’Brien responded with an hour and a half of interviews with more than a dozen young Vermonters — unidentified as they speak and credited at the conclusion only by their first names — picturing the human face of the problem.
“They’re called painkillers for more than one reason,” a girl named Lexi says in the film. “It’s not just for physical pain, it’s for mental, emotional pain.”
But such freedom from hurt comes at a cost — often hundreds of dollars a day, thousands of dollars a month. Participants talk of pawning family possessions, stealing everything from credit cards to copper piping and power cable. That led many to court, some to jail, and a few to their deaths.
Enter the doctor: “Those who would suggest that they’re getting what they deserve — that’s inhuman,” Holmes says in the film. “I believe that they have a very serious illness that they did not choose, is relentless, relapsing and potentially fatal. Our obligation is to help them treat that.”
O’Brien spent two solitary years raising her own production money, filming with a lone cameraman and mining 150 hours of interview footage with a sole editor. Unveiling the film in the fall of 2013, the cast and crew motored more than 3,000 miles during a statewide tour that drew 5,000 Vermont viewers.
The screenings were supposed to stop with the arrival of a new year in 2014. Instead, O’Brien learned that Shumlin would be spotlighting “The Hungry Heart” in his State of the State address.
In the speech, the governor announced his office would pay for the documentary to be shown in every middle and high school in the state. Soon after came screenings at such places as an American Academy of Pediatrics conference in Boston, the Arkansas Attorney General’s Prescription Drug Abuse Summit in Little Rock, and a program hosted by U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., in Washington, D.C.
Two years after its premiere, the bookings continue throughout New England and the nation. O’Brien, for example, is set to speak Sept. 11 at a Cape Cod Symposium on Addictive Disorders screening titled “How a Film Helped Raise Consciousness and Pushed a Governor To Focus on Opiate Addiction.”
“People can relate to human stories — they hit you in a way statistics don’t,” she says. “What the film helps to do is bring the issue into the light of day. That is the first step. Until you admit you have a problem, you can’t go anywhere from there.”
O’Brien has shot and is editing her next documentary — a film on eating disorders set to tour the state in the fall of 2016. First, however, she has to finish up her seemingly never-ending “The Hungry Heart” roadshow featured on the film’s website, thehungryheartmovie.org.
“It’s like being in a rock and roll band — you look and say, ‘Where are we?’ It’s exhausting for sure, but I’m not going to make a movie unless I can get out there and see that it makes an impact.”
Editor’s note: Bess O’Brien is the mother of Jasper Craven who was hired on Aug. 31 to cover politics for VTDigger.
Kevin O’Connor, a former staffer of the Rutland Herald and Barre-Montpelier Times Argus, is a Brattleboro-based writer. Email: kevinoconnorvt@gmail.com
