Askey’s affectionate however restrained strategy to his topics jogged my memory of Michael Dominic’s 2002 documentary Sunshine Hotel, one other observational portrait of individuals residing on the margins of society. It follows the residents of a single-room occupancy lodge within the Bowery, letting them inform their tales in their very own phrases. In Love within the Time of Fentanyl, there aren’t any voice-overs or speaking heads. Instead, Askey permits day-to-day life within the area to unfold, capturing the camaraderie amid the chaos at OPS. They maintain security conferences, say prayers, crack jokes, and strum guitars. Murals brighten the indoor partitions and alleyways outdoors the constructing; a canine named Zelda nuzzles into laps. 

“I didn’t want it to just be about the tragedy and the deaths that were happening in the community,” Askey says. “Most people haven’t been in these places, and I wanted to push people past their comfort zones and their preconceived notions of who these people are and what these sites do.” 

And so we watch Ronnie brush his enamel and tie his sneakers; we watch Sarah gab on the telephone. While Askey clearly has affection for his topics, he presents them plainly, with out proselytizing for his or her trigger or romanticizing their lives. The closest he will get to instilling the movie with a thesis is when his digicam lingers on these quotidian moments. The message is tough to overlook: These are regular folks. 

Ah, however regular folks can do issues which are arduous to look at. Not all of the individuals who work on the OPS additionally use its providers, however a few of them do, and Askey doesn’t keep away from this truth. Just as he holds lengthy pictures of his topics going about their humdrum day by day routines, he additionally exhibits what it seems prefer to be a functioning drug consumer. 

This is just not nice viewing. Even individuals who support overdose prevention websites would possibly watch the scene the place Dana straightens up after hours by means of their fingers. He rigorously locations chairs on high of desks, ensuring all the things is so as. He whistles as he works. Then he seems within the mirror in entrance of one of many desks, takes out a syringe and injects himself in a vein in his neck. The digicam stays steadily on his reflection till he’s completed. Dana resumes cleansing, closes up, and heads dwelling. 

“I wanted to let people have the full picture, as much as I could,” Askey advised me, after I requested about his choice to incorporate injection footage. It felt dishonest to not present drug use in a documentary about folks attempting to make drug use safer, in any case. Although I hated watching these scenes, they’re a essential a part of why Love within the Time of Fentanyl is such an important film. It’s not attempting to sanitize the picture of overdose prevention areas. “I don’t think the film answers many questions. It’s more my hope that it could help people ask the right questions,” Askey says. 

One such query could be: Why aren’t these areas extra commonplace within the United States? New York opened the nation’s first area in 2021; to this point, similar to OPS, it has saved lives. In an period the place the overdose disaster continues to speed up, it’s weird that this profitable initiative has spurred so few imitators to open their doorways. Other efforts to open comparable areas elsewhere within the nation have been stymied due to how politicized something to do with fentanyl has develop into. In California, for instance, Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed a 2022 invoice authorizing pilot applications in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Oakland. 

Opponents of overdose prevention areas argue that they may encourage drug use. The movie captures the mundane, pragmatic actuality of those areas, how they’re neither glamorously hedonistic nor hellishly wicked, and positively nothing to worry. Although Love within the Time of Fentanyl is just not meant to evangelize, its warts-and-all depiction could possibly be the important thing to altering minds.