Accessibility Links
Welcome to Vancouver's Skid Row
This documentary, produced by Allan King, examines the life of the alcoholic
derelict on Vancouver's "skid row". In this segment, Jimmy, who lives by the
harbour, talks about his life over the years and how he has survived living on
the streets. His answers reflect the hopelessness he feels about his day-to-day
existence, often panhandling and spending the money on alcohol.
• Skid Row, which was filmmaker Allan King's first documentary, featured a script
by Ben Maartman and narration by Art Hives. John Avison composed the original
music. It tells the story of three homeless men who are poor, unemployed and
addicted to alcohol.
• King continued to produce and later direct documentaries for the CBC before
going independent. His most famous documentaries were carefully prepared and
researched in advance, yet were known for their controversy. Two films, A
Married Couple (1969) and Warrendale (1967), broke boundaries for
their unfiltered realism and established King as one of the world's best
documentary filmmakers.
• Allan King was born in Vancouver in 1930. He went into filmmaking because
he "had a fantasy (that) everyone would see my films and be changed for the
better. That's why you want to make films."
Medium: Television
Program: Explorations
Broadcast Date: Jan. 22, 1957
Producer: Allan King
Duration: 4:34
Program: Explorations
Broadcast Date: Jan. 22, 1957
Producer: Allan King
Duration: 4:34
Last updated: March 23, 2012
Page consulted on March 20, 2013
All Clips from this Topic
-
CBC producer Allan King's first documentary takes us to Vancouver's Wa...
-
A panel of five women, each an activist in her own field, discusses ac...
-
Forced from her home, a New Brunswick teen describes life on the stree...
-
Alcohol, cons and despair: aboriginal people living on skid row.
-
An Edmonton man encases himself in a block of ice to raise awareness o...