Pacific Cinémathèque Monograph Series #2 features Nettie Wild, one of the leading documentarians working in Canadian cinema today. Her work and her interests span the globe and also encompass issues of regional interest to the broader Western Canadian/British Columbia community.

She is best known for her feature length documentary films, A Place Called Chiapas (1998), A Rustling of Leaves: Inside the Philippine Revolution (1989/90), and Blockade (1993). A Place Called Chiapaswon the 1999 Genie Award for Best Canadian Feature Documentary and has played theatrically in over 100 cities in cinemas across North America. Most recently, Ms. Wild produced and directed the award-winning Fix: The Story of an Addicted City, a film focusing on the struggle to open North America's first safe injection site in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. She also directedBevel Up: Drugs, Users & Outreach Nursing, an interactive teaching DVD produced by the Street Nurse Program of the BC Centre for Disease Control and the National Film Board of Canada.

Nettie Wild came to film from a background of journalism and theatre. Her radio documentaries of the Philippine guerrilla war and the snap revolution, which brought Mrs. Aquino to power, were carried extensively by CBC on programs such as Sunday Morning, As It Happens, Morningside, and Ideas.

Praise for Wild at Heart: The Films of Nettie Wild:

"Both the interview (with Claudia Medina) and the essay (by Mark Harris) reveal Wild's approach to the struggles she has filmed with leftist guerillas in the Philippines and Chiapas as well as with Native activists in Canada and, most recently, the hard-pressed defenders of Insite, Vancouver's safe-injection haven for drug addicts ... Wild's films are very smart travelogues shot in places and with people in conflict. Committed as she is to their causes and dangerous as her position might be ... she avoids equating herself with her subjects. And that, in a medium that encourages unearned empathy, is an invitation to us to do the same." (Canadian Literature)

Praise for Nettie Wild's A Place Called Chiapas (Winner, Genie Award, Best Canadian Documentary 1999):

"Wild and her camera crew get right into the thick of this tense situation, and come up with a revealing depiction of the tensions and ambiguities of life in Chiapas." (Variety)

"It took guts to get this on camera." (The New Yorker)

Praise for Nettie Wild's Fix: The Story of an Addicted City:

"[T]his is a breathless piece of reportage, like a vintage New Yorker feature put to film: expansive, comic, digressive and ever so slightly demented." (Eye Weekly)

"[Wild] has returned home to fund unrest in her own backyard, and leaves no doubt where her sympathies lie. To that end, bravely avoiding the crutch of voice-over narration, she sets out to dramatize the case, and engrossingly succeeds." (The Globe and Mail)

Rev. Mark Harris is currently a pastor in Halifax, NS. His most recent project is The Light That Lives in Darkness (Gaspereau Press, 2004), a collaborative effort with New Brunswick artist Dan Steeves.

Mark Harris' profile page

Claudia Medina's profile page