James Armstrong
Jim is the Director of Marketing and Innovation for Phoenix Futures. Alongside a number of charities with a shared passion to address the harm caused by the of stigma addiction, Phoenix helped create the Recovery Street Film Festival. The Festival uses film to facilitate people with lived experience to tell their story in their own way, and to engage others to reflect and learn from that experience.
The Recovery Street Film Festival
Roger Ebert, the film critic and author, said “We all are born with a certain package. We are who we are: where we were born, who we were born as, how we were raised. We’re kind of stuck inside that person, and the purpose of civilization and growth is to be able to reach out and empathize a little bit with other people. And for me, the movies are like a machine that generates empathy. It lets you understand a little bit more about different hopes, aspirations, dreams and fears. It helps us to identify with the people who are sharing this journey with us.”
The Recovery Street Film Festival is a project that encourages people in recovery to share their stories through short film making. The process of making, sharing, viewing and reflecting on the festival films is designed to help us put aside the stereotypical narratives of addiction and connect through our shared hopes, aspirations, dreams and fears. The aim of the festival is to play a part in addressing the self, societal and structural stigma of addiction that creates harm and leads to discrimination.