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Was this film intended to be feminist? The lens is narrowly focused on three very strong and compassionate women. There's not a lot of funding and help for people suffering from addiction, so being part of the national conversation is awesome for me and for them.

They've been in the trenches so long doing this work without a lot of support, and the reactions to the film have validated their work. These are three women leading the charge. Jan Rader, the fire chief, was invited to attend the State of the Union address recently with Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, and all three women have been able to speak at the Obama Foundation Summit. People who have been in recovery for 20 years or mothers who have lost children or fellow EMS and first responders are reaching out to say, 'I want to thank you.' It's usually the filmmaker receiving a majority of the comments, but the film has resonated with so many people who have been offering incredible letters of support from all around the world to. I have, but more importantly, the women profiled in the film have. Have you received an emotionally charged response from people after they've seeing the film? This crisis makes headlines now, but when we started almost three years ago, a lot of people weren’t even sure what the opioid crisis was. It's helped turn the page on the shame based conversation around addiction into a dialogue about how can we fight a public health crisis. Screenings have been hosted in prisons and rehabs and people’s homes. The film has been able to reach church communities that have been doing narcan training and instruction, passing out clean needles, etc. These are women who don't judge people, who see as a disease that needs to be treated as such and are trying to help people on a daily basis. With Heroin(e) I was trying to open up the conversation for people who have a hard time relating to that kind of portrayal. Oftentimes the tactic to showcase this problem is some type of dramatic scene of users prepping the drug and shooting it up. Was that a conscious choice on your part? In fact, the viewer never sees it at all. In a film focusing on heroin, the substance isn't on display. I think all of us are just one really bad injury away from potentially getting hooked. I myself have never struggled with addiction, and I'm very lucky to say that. I have friends too who have found their way into long-term recovery, and I'm hopeful that as a country we will find our way out of. Just looking at my cheerleading squad in middle school and my high school graduating class reminds me how many friends and classmates ultimately became addicted, lost their children or have overdosed. Getting prescribed opioid medications for pain was originally how the epidemic started in my neck of the woods-when towns like Kermit, West Virginia, which has a population of less than 400, was awash in nine million opioid pills in two years in a single pharmacy. Just down the road from where I went to grade school, there was a 'pill mill' with a constant line around the corner of people waiting to get their prescription of Ox圜ontin or Percocet.

What was your exposure to the opioid epidemic and to heroin use prior to making this film?Įlaine McMillion Sheldon: I grew up in Logan, West Virginia. With an unflinching observational lens, Sheldon's film highlights three women working to change Huntington’s future and break the devastating cycle of drug abuse one life at a time.Įarlier this month, I spoke with Sheldon by phone about her powerful short film. She lights a path towards recovery by using three beacons of hope and compassion in the city of Huntington- its fire chief, Jan Rader, who spends many days and nights responding to overdose calls to administer the oftentimes controversial drug naloxone to save people who might otherwise die Judge Patricia Keller, who presides over Huntington's drug court, handing down empathy along with orders and Necia Freeman of Brown Bag Ministry, who hands out free meals to the women selling their bodies for drugs. One way is the road taken by Peabody Award-winning filmmaker Elaine McMillion Sheldon in her Oscar-nominated short documentary, Heroin(e). When a film focuses on one of the nation's most vilified drugs, how can a filmmaker break through the cynicism and judgment audiences often place on those unable to free themselves from its grasp? In no place is this struggle on view more pointedly than in Huntington, West Virginia, an Appalachian city with an overdose rate 10 times the national average. Across America, but most pervasively in small industrial towns across the country, decades of excessive opioid prescriptions have led to a national epidemic of heroin overdoses.

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