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Filmmaker's Notes: Helen Slinger
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During the winter of 2008-09, Vancouver’s international reputation shattered in a hail of bullets. Often considered one of the best places on earth to live, the lower mainland suddenly looked like the most dangerous – with a targeted killing every six days during the worst of the violence. And little Abbotsford, a bedroom community about an hour’s drive from Vancouver, became Ground Zero in what was the most brutal gang war in BC history.
Helen Slinger, Director
For many months, while the situation worsened, most people were comforted by the fact that the victims were generally gangsters – the “it can’t happen to us” syndrome. But that changed as the violence became more brazen and public, and after innocent bystanders were killed. Suddenly nobody felt safe and, for a time, the city that everybody wanted to visit became the city people were avoiding, if at all possible.
We set out first to simply find out – WHAT HAPPENED? How could the situation have spiraled out of control? Along the way we kept looking for people who were brave enough to tell their stories as we wanted the documentary to be more than a shoot-em-up or a police action flick. It’s so easy to stereotype people who somehow get drawn into the gang life - and then dismiss them as “other” than us good regular folk. We found characters who aren’t easy to dismiss because they could be any of our children, our sisters, our selves. So The Gangster Next Door moves, in a dramatic arc, through the key battles in that horrific gang war to the present day. That’s the spine of the story. Along that spine are attached the stories of gangsters and girlfriends, of policemen, of mothers who fight to save their children, and who mourn their loss.
By layering on-the-scene footage with intimate interviews and clear-sighted analysis, we worked to bring the who and the why together into one integrated piece.
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