Love in the Time of Fentanyl - Indie Lens Pop-Up Screening

NEW: In attendance for the Q&A 

Sarah Blyth, Executive Director and co-founder of the O.P.S. She, along with other community members and activists, started the organization in 2016 as a direct response to the record-breaking number of overdose deaths and the government’s inaction.

Heather Lusk, Executive Director of the Hawai'i Health & Harm Reduction Center. Heather has over thirty years of experience dedicated to reducing health disparities and stigma as it relates to HIV, viral hepatitis and other chronic conditions linked to substance use.

Nikos Leverenz, policy chair of the Hawai'i Health & Harm Reduction Center. Advancing direct services, partnerships, and policy changes that improve the health and well-being of persons from under resourced and over criminalized communities continues to animate his work.

Love in the Time of Fentanyl / By Colin Askey, Monika Navarro, Marc Serpa Francoeur, and Robinder Uppal

As the number of overdose deaths in Vancouver, Canada reaches an all-time high, the Overdose Prevention Society (OPS) opens its doors—a renegade safe injection site that primarily employs current or former drug users. Its staff and volunteers save lives and give hope to a marginalized community as the overdose crisis rages throughout Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. The film follows Sarah, an activist who opened OPS without government approval, as she strives to raise awareness about the crisis; Trey, a graffiti artist and former heroin user who spends his days reversing overdoses and memorializing lost community members; Ronnie, a seasoned frontline worker nicknamed “Narcan Jesus,” struggling with burnout from the demanding work and witnessing so much loss; Norma, a much-loved Indigenous elder in the community, who cooks meals for the staff when she’s not administering naloxone; and Dana, an active fentanyl user who constantly saves lives at work while struggling with his own drug use. With loved ones dying in unprecedented numbers, the staff at OPS does whatever it takes to keep the doors open and find radical new ways out of the devastating but widely ignored crisis ravaging their community. Love in the Time of Fentanyl is an intimate, observational look beyond the stigma of injection drug users, revealing the courage of those facing tragedy in a neighborhood often referred to as ground zero of the overdose crisis.

Time: Friday February 3, 2023 - doors open at 5:15, screening starts at 5:30 pm followed community driven conversation.

Location: Hub Coworking HI, 1050 Queen Street, 100, Honolulu, HI 96814