The camera pans across the cage of a Safeway shopping cart while the suburban mansions of Vancouver's North Shore blur by at 70 km/h.  The cart screams down the hill with an unbearable rattle as a bearded madman clings to the back end.  There is no brake.  The crude racer must be steered and stopped by the delicate manipulation of the pilot's right shoe.  The pungent smell of a melting shoe soul is equated with freedom for these invisible urban warriors.  

Film Review

Carts Of Darkness

Director: Murray Siple

HOT DOCS Carts Of Darkness WEBSITE  

4 Stars 

Reviewed By: Todd Andre (Calgary Correspondent - Canada) 

The camera pans across the cage of a Safeway shopping cart while the suburban mansions of Vancouver's North Shore blur by at 70 km/h.  The cart screams down the hill with an unbearable rattle as a bearded madman clings to the back end.  There is no brake.  The crude racer must be steered and stopped by the delicate manipulation of the pilot's right shoe.  The pungent smell of a melting shoe soul is equated with freedom for these invisible urban warriors.  

"It's not like it's all free" insists Big Al in a scene from Carts of Darkness (2008), minutes before plunging down the ominous sounding Mountain Highway, one of Vancouver's steepest stretches of road.  Shoes cut into the profit margins of his recyclables, and stealing shopping carts is punishable by jail, but Big Al gladly pays the price again and again to practice his sport.

Big Al is part of a subculture of bottle pickers who risk injury, arrest and footwear racing shopping carts down the paved slopes of suburban Vancouver.  In his first film in ten years, director Murray Siple tries to recapture the thrill of snowboard photography he was forced to abandon after a tragic car accident that bound him to a wheelchair.  He felt the same outlaw energy in these scrappy cart racers as he felt from the snowboarders of the late 90s.     

His film features harrowing shopping cart races shot in the stirring style characteristic of contemporary snowboarding films, but complemented by a compelling story which documents the harsh realities of Vancouver's street life.  The film mirrors films typical of the sport genre by depicting the athletic mastery of its stars alongside the delinquent belligerence of their binge drinking shenanigans.  In this film, though, drinking is depicted as a disease, and the daring physical feats are performed for their own sake rather than corporate sponsors.

Big Al, Fergie and Bob - despite their sparse living conditions - exude a dignity that supersedes the narcissism that plagues the sport film genre. Whether it's flying down a hill or rummaging through bottles and cans, these men see themselves as being free and independent of the system. Unfortunately, freedom comes at the price of public indifference to their existence. Siple doesn't glamourize the homeless lifestyle like Forum might glamourize one of their sponsored snowboarders, but he gives us an unsympathetic peek into their lives that paints them as agents of their own change.  These men have not serendipitously stumbled into the misery of poverty, they have refused to be prisoners of our socio-economic system.     

This film is about crawling underneath the assumptions we make based on appearances. "I discovered that like them, I face an obstacle-riddled culture of judgments based on first impressions and stereotypes," said Siple. He tries to subvert a culture obsessed with images by lending legitimacy to an ‘illegitimate' sport and lifestyle in the same way snowboard videos solidified snowboard subculture into the 90s mainstream. At the time, snowboarders rejected the superficiality of the image culture, whereas now it embodies it. The shopping cart racers channel the same outlandish and rebellious attitude that characterized early snowboarders - an attitude that has long since washed away by the commercialization of the sport. 

Siple's filmic resurrection is a refreshing parody of the self-important extreme sports genre, and at the same time it stands up as an important piece of social commentary. The film manages to move homelessness from the periphery of our vision to the centre of our attention, while dragging extreme sports back into the realm of possibility. Snowboarding and skiing stunts have reached heights of superhuman achievement that verge on the impossible. Flying down a dangerous hill on the back of a shopping cart seems insanely dangerous, but it is well within the means of most people. Carts of Darkness re-democratizes extreme sports and will thrill crowds at Hot Docs.