Beyond the stereotypes

Surviving Earth is a new film that rejects stereotypes and easy explanations to shine a light on the complexities of substance use and family, says Sophie Wilsdon.

This week, I sat in a steering group with BDP Creative Communities members, staff and volunteers, thinking about how best to celebrate BDP’s 40th birthday in a concert later this year.

The group felt strongly that although there’s so much to celebrate, it’s also vital we take time to recognise what and who has been lost in those many years – and what the reality of drug use can be for individuals and their families.

It’s this reality – the messy plurality of drug use – that is captured in Surviving Earth, the debut feature film by writer/director Thea Gajić. Themes of relationships, parenting, drug use, relapse, resilience after trauma and survival through music are delicately and accurately played out through Thea’s own lived experience. 

The film has a particular resonance to BDP in that its lead characters, Vlad, Duncan and Misko, were group workers here for many years and formed Fuzia with other colleagues including myself. Misko sadly passed away before the film went into production, bringing an additional poignancy.

Personal and professional 

The film touches so many intersections of drugs work and recovery that cross between the personal and professional, and it will have a particular resonance for anyone whose life has been touched by addiction in some way. Our field is full of people with lived experience, which brings invaluable insight, knowledge and understanding. But it can also make it hard for people to ask for help when struggling with their own triggers while maintaining a job in the drugs field, on top of other responsibilities. 

Thea wanted to touch on this directly in the film. ‘I’m very keen to break the negative stereotypes around addiction and see how highly functioning people can be even when they need help to get clean,’ she says. ‘If we break those taboos, more people would feel safe to speak about it, and ultimately more lives would be saved.’

The film’s story is told from the daughter’s perspective, and tenderly explores the ways children navigate living alongside parental substance use. ‘One of the most challenging things was deciding whose point of view to tell the story from,’ she says. ‘It’s written from my point of view, but I had to figure out whose is the most interesting perspective to tell it from because if it was the daughter’s, it would’ve missed a lot of Vlad’s story.’ 

The reality of drug use is rarely portrayed well on the big screen, it being much easier to resort to stereotypes and black and white thinking. Slavko Sobin’s portrayal of Vlad is a welcome respite from this – he manages to capture the charm of someone who inspires love and loyalty despite repeatedly inflicting damage on those closest to him. 

‘It’s a full-bodied role with this amazing range of things that you need to show and live through,’ he says. ‘And it’s an important story because it talks about healing and friendship and humanity. I play a recovering drug addict at a point in his life where it’s really hard to remain strong and not go back to using. So it’s a challenge on its own to have to play that duality, someone who wants to be strong but isn’t.’

Passion and drive

What Slavko, and the film, also brilliantly portray is the passion and drive that music and creativity can inspire in someone in the shadow of trauma. Vlad lives out his dreams of playing music from his homeland with his friends, pushing them to take bigger financial and personal risks to achieve it. Music brought and bound the friends together, tumbling through gigs and parties and fall-outs and reunions. 

One of Thea’s key collabora­tors was composer and musical director Hugo Brijs, who brought the sound of Fuzia to life. The soundtrack is inspired by original Fuzia songs and some of us from the original band worked on the soundtrack and as musical consultants.

Shared experience

Alex, a musician with years of gigging experience, says that ‘for someone like me with a lived experience of drug abuse, mental illness and trauma, working with an orchestra whose members share similar lived experiences gives us a great camaraderie in our process of growth and understanding of music and recovery.’

For others, it’s a new experience that gently nudges people out of their comfort zone to create an incredible shared experience – something that’s also passed onto our audiences. 

Risk of relapse 

As in real life, the film music also created situations where risk of relapse was present – working in a night-time economy and a culture infused with alcohol and drugs. Many musicians come into recovery unsure if they can, or even want to, carry on playing music. 

It’s in this context that we created Bristol Recovery Orchestra in 2019, as part of BDP Creative Communities. Creative Communities began in 2014, in the group work team where Vlad, Misko and Duncan spent many an afternoon jamming with clients in post-group sessions. 

While Rising Voices Choir is our longest standing group, and the only one Vlad was witness to, it’s the orchestra that particularly resonates with Surviving Earth. Although we’re partnered with Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, we’re an orchestra in the loosest sense of the word. We welcome musicians of any background and instrument, and the only criteria is to play your instrument well enough to be able to follow a structure – and to have lived experience.

There are many reasons it exists, and people get many different things from it – confidence, fun, recovery support, new skills, and performance opportunities. Added to this, it’s a space where people can experience the healing power of music away from the triggering settings where it’s often created and performed. Some of our members have come into music after becoming drug free, while others are seeking a space where they can come back to their instruments and perform in a structured and drug-free environment.

Surviving Earth is well worth an hour and a half of your time – go see it, support independent film, and help shine a light on the complexities that lie behind every drug-related death. And when we get together on stage later on in the year to celebrate 40 years of BDP, we’ll also play music that reflects those who aren’t with us any more – but whose creativity lives on through us.

Surviving Earth is released in UK cinemas on 24 April
@survivingearthfilm @bdpcreativecommunities
@bristoldrugsproject @metisfilmsuk