By Kevin Potvin

While the film Citizen Sam shows us the ugly darkness at the soul of the man Vancouverites must call His Worship, the film Five Ring Circus, by filmmaker Conrad Schmidt, by welcome contrast shows us real civic leadership that is found in the bright souls of people Vancouver-ites typically see being carted off by police in riot gear on the 11 o’clock News.

The contrast between the two film debuts, both at The Rio on Broadway, could not be sharper. Where Sam Sullivan is revealed in Citizen Sam as a man who hunts maniacally for power with no idea of what to do with it once he achieves it, activists like Betty Krawczyk and the young rebels in the Anti-Poverty Committee in Five Ring Circus have nothing but ideas, and no pretensions to power whatsoever. “We are on the floor, we are not resisting arrest,” a group shout in unison from the upper floor of a vacant building they have occupied to protest years of government inaction on homelessness. They peer power-lessly down at busloads of police outfitted in full battle dress congregating in the alley below. On their faces is much the same expression as Sullivan had on the eve of his mayoralty election victory, only he was whispering, not shouting, and it wasn’t to police but only to a camera, and it wasn’t a plea to avoid tear gas and a clubbing over the head, but only his narcissistic and self-pitying Hamlet moment asking himself if he really wants this job of mayor—and chair of the police board, not incidentally.

Five Ring Circus reaffirms for the doubtful viewer that civic leadership is still out there, if not necessarily dressed in a suit and a tie. Doubtful because very little of the anti-Olympics, pro-housing, anti-highway, pro-Eagleridge Bluffs, pro-environment view-point is ever portrayed in the mainstream media, except to show us the inevitable results of disobedience to the reigning ideology: arrests, jailings, and political hand-washing.

The star

Despite all the drama of young shouting protesters and police milling about at illegal occupations, it is the lone image of Betty Krawczyk, 78, struggling by herself in the dusty distance trying to erect a tent on a dirt road in the wilderness, and in the way of huge highway-making equipment, that sticks most poignantly in the mind after watching Five Ring Circus. Above the din of machinery, you can barely hear her calling to someone off camera, perhaps to the camera person himself, pleading for help getting the tent to stand up.

It seems only the young and the old have the clarity of mind and the selflessness of heart to speak up and oppose, and even physically get in the way of, immoral, unsustainable, and unjust decisions and actions usually made and carried out by the powerful—usually aged somewhere in the middle, where every-one’s bent on personal power, personal for-tune, and per-sonal advance-ment.

The film also makes clear how advanced and efficient the police, the courts, the cor-porations, and the halls of political power have be-come at sidestepping, absorbing, pushing aside, or crushing dis-sent. With specially-designed sheets featuring reinforced handles allowing police to remove sitting protesters without any possibility of physically injuring them, with press conferences attended by leading media allowing mayors and side-kick councillors to dismiss doubts with lies and empty promises without any possibility of discovery, and with machinery and capital allowing corporate managers to swiftly lay waste to ten-thousand-year old ecosystems and hundred-year-old poor people’s housing with court-issued injunctions already in hand, there should be no doubt of the futility of protest anymore. And yet, police, politicians, corporate managers, and, most especially, court judges, need to watch Five Ring Circus and imagine what this world would be like if they ever got their wish and no one cared anymore about the environment and the homeless.

See Five Ring Circus at The Rio, Broadway and Commercial, from March 2 to March 8, at 9:15.