Monkey on the Back

A "thriller" of the evils of cigarette smoking, set in a Gothic boudoir. A young woman lights up one cigarette after another. The clock strikes twelve, wind from the balcony door blows out the candles and a vampire stands in the doorway. As he approaches her, she still finds time to light up another cigarette. The vampire bends over the woman to find nourishment and, as he backs away, he gasps his last breath amidst a puff of smoke. A clever statement on an important problem.

A revealing portrait of two young addicts, their life on the street and their despairing parents who find themselves powerless to save their children from the habit that is consuming them. As filmmaker Andrée Cazabon follows Cathy and Laurent for many months, recording their desperate drug-fuelled existence, she remembers her own life on the street. "My parents and I relived that horror," she says of her creative journey. But it was for all parents that she made this film. Cathy's and Laurent's parents live in a permanent state of bewildered anxiety and guilt. How can they avoid being totally destroyed by grief? How do they manage to carry on with their lives, in spite of everything? And how do they deal with a system that views them with suspicion? By grimly showing two children in the grip of a brutal addiction, No Quick Fix hopes to alleviate and identify some of the enormous pain endured by parents coping with an addicted child. In French with English subtitles.

In an atmosphere charged with domestic strife and tension, this film brings into focus the work of the Family Welfare Service in a large Canadian city. It portrays one of the typical cases with which this welfare organization is called upon to deal--the husband who deserts his family, leaving the wife to fend for herself and her children. The film does not pass judgment on the husband but shows how, through the understanding counsel of a social welfare worker, the family is reunited and a way found out of their dilemma.