I’ve experienced more times than I ever wanted how the world sees and treats addicted people and those who live unhoused. Simply being with my relatives was oftentimes enough for others to see me the same way. The isolation, the contempt, and the lack of attempts to understand hurt. And so, I decided to tell our story.
The ostracising approach to addiction and living unhoused fails to address the root causes – trauma, poverty, and social exclusion – and instead further marginalises people who experience them. It fails to see addiction as a way of coping with pain, a survival strategy, often not the original problem at all. I wanted to challenge the belief that addiction is a failure of will and to offer a trauma-sensitive perspective that uses memories, shared childhood and love as a lens through which to look at my older brother and cousins who live unhoused and with addiction. It understands addiction not as a personal failure, but as an adaptive response to pain, disconnection, and unmet emotional needs.
In times when addiction continues to spread across the globe, I believe it is essential to look beyond symptoms and moral judgements. In societies shaped by individualism, performance pressure, and weakening social bonds, compassion is often replaced by blame. Yet research consistently shows that punitive and exclusionary approaches to addiction fail to reduce harm and instead reinforce stigma and deepen trauma. Addiction is not an individual, isolated problem that appears on its own. It is rooted in early relational and social environments shaped by stress, disruption, and a lack of attunement, rather than personal or familial failure. And in a world marked by uncertainty, parallel wars, ecological crises, inflation, and growing social and economic divides, suffering accumulates under systemic pressure and is often carried across generations.
We know a lot about helping people with addiction and those who live unhoused, yet many governments still choose an ostracising path. We need destigmatization, trauma-informed care, social housing, and treatment that is both accessible and humane. We need to offer connection, not control. In a time of escalating crises, compassion is not only a moral stance but a necessary foundation for any meaningful social response.
Last but not least, this film is about what it means to try to help a relative who experiences addiction and how genuinely exhausting and self-destroying such a path can be without proper boundaries. I couldn’t save my father, but I decided to try to save my older brother. But what does it mean to save someone, and is it even possible without compromising one’s own mental health and life? Perhaps true respect is to accept the person, the tempo of their healing, the way they live and, therefore, maybe the way they die. But to love them nonetheless, without judgement. This film maps the journey.
Pepa Lubojacki
