Heroin heroine

>> Helena Trestiková’s In a Trap-Katka documents five years in a Czech junkie’s life

By GENEVIEVE PAIEMENT

Even in drug movies that eventually spiral downward into hell, there are often enough stylish camera angles and a smart soundtrack to allow you to see the appeal—even for a second—of heroin and the like. Then madness, poverty and death swoop in to convince you otherwise. Czech filmmaker Helena Trestiková’s documentary In a Trap-Katka, about a young heroin addict, cuts straight to the misery.

Trestiková, the soft-spoken auteure, in town for the Cinémathèque québécoise’s spotlight on new Czech cinema, struggles with her scant English in our interview, but her emotional attachment to the subject comes through loud and clear. “Since the revolution, many young people developed drug problems,” Trestiková explains. “It’s not a completely new problem, but it’s a big problem. I feel like Katka is my daughter now, we got very close.”

The film is part of a 10-part prime time TV series in which Trestiková followed women from all walks of life, including a famous singer, an activist, a journalist, a social worker and a prostitute. Like Brit filmmaker Michael Apted’s TV series Seven Up, only instead of checking in every seven years, Trestiková followed each subject closely for five years, from ’96 to 2000.

In a Trap opens with Katka, age 20, in rehab. She quickly gets back on the streets, meets an older junkie boyfriend and turns to shoplifting full-time to feed her growing habit. She shoots up and speaks of her childhood spent in constant fear of her abusive stepfather and her early infatuation with drugs, all in a raspy junked-out drone, slumped over, eyes half-closed. “I wanted to show the very, very dark moments people have with drugs,” says Trestiková. “I wanted to show how people cannot help themselves—they need others to.”

Indeed, Katka and her beau repeat over and over how they wish they could quit and have a normal life. Eventually, Katka ditches the boyfriend and slips into prostitution. A familiar drug story, for sure, but here it’s stripped bare of artifice, particularly when Katka explains, tears in her eyes, hands and face bloated and marked, that she will soon develop cirrhosis of the liver and that she has no hope of ever getting better.

In the last scene, as Katka gets picked up and driven off by a John, one can’t help but think that this film could have gone horribly awry. “We were afraid the whole time we were filming her,” Trestiková acknowledges. Especially since she admits to having given Katka money to buy drugs, the issue of exploitation in documentary filmmaking comes to mind.

When I put this question to Trestiková, she doesn’t understand the word “exploitation” and I do an insufficient job of explaining it. Did people accuse her of using Katka for a good story? “When the film was shown on TV, the reaction was very good,” she offers. “People understood my message.”

In the end, the latest news about Katka does offer some hope: “She was still on the street when In a Trap showed on TV,” Trestiková says. “When her street friends saw it, they said, ‘You have to make something of yourself.’ So now she is finally in a methadone clinic.” :

In a Trap—Katka screens April 27, 8:30pm at the Cinémathèque québécoise