Film about heroin withdrawal sells out world premiere at Atlanta Film Fest

Credit: Courtesy of Aaron Strand

Credit: Courtesy of Aaron Strand

When Jay meets Viv, she is a wealthy law school student. She plays guitar and has an angelic voice and soft facial features. Jay is an eccentric artist with a free spirit. They fall in love. But as heroin enters their veins, their lives spiral.

When they bottom out, they seek the help of doctor who prescribes Suboxone, a medication used to combat opioid dependence. By blocking the brain’s neurotransmitters, it fulfills the user’s craving for opioids while keeping them from getting high. Research has shown that individuals who take Suboxone —buprenorphine by its scientific name — are more likely to stay clean and less likely to die from overdose.

The only problem is that to take it, one has to be clean from drugs for at least 12 hours or it will send the body into rapid detox (exponentially worse than normal withdrawal).

The main timeline of the film centers on Viv and Jay’s fight to survive one harrowing night of heroin withdrawal to make it back to the Suboxone doctor at dawn.

The intensity of “Withdrawal” is similar to the 2010 film “127 Hours,” about a mountaineer who gets his arm pinned by an 800-pound boulder in a Utah canyon and has to amputate his own limb to get free.

There is vomit. There is diarrhea. There are cold sweats, leg cramps and volcanic emotions.

Throughout the film, there are flashbacks; back to the days before Viv and Jay used drugs. As the couple replays memories from their past, they have an unspoken obsession with trying to figure out where it all went wrong.

Credit: Courtesy of Aaron Strand

Credit: Courtesy of Aaron Strand

The film is shot in a gritty style using vintage DV recorders. The audio track, composed by former Atlantan Nicolette Emanuel, is layered with distortion and the raw, hypnotic tones of Velvet Underground’s “Heroin,” adding to the vibe.

“I wanted to try to draw an audience into that experience and give this very textural, sensorial feeling of what addiction, and particularly withdrawal from opiates, feels like,” Strand said.

Strand knows. The film is inspired by his own experience with heroin withdrawal. Like his protagonists, Strand had a promising future. In his 20s, he was an aspiring actor studying drama at prestigious New York University.

“The whole time I was a junkie,” he said. “I basically kind of ruined a lot of those early opportunities … I ended up being homeless for a while and I crawled back to Georgia to my parents’ house in Athens needing to turn my life around."

He started journaling in his early sobriety at the recommendation of his outpatient rehab counselor.

“Those rambling journals very quickly turned into little bits of dialogue,” Strand said.

Those bits became a jumping off place years later for the “Withdrawal” script, which was written improvisationally with his lead actors.

When he was getting sober, he also watched several films about characters with addiction: Jerry Schatzberg’s “The Panic in Needle Park” starring Al Pacino, and Paul Morrissey’s “Trash” with actor Joe Dallesandro.

Those films helped him make sense of the disorienting experience he had just been through. It motivated him to learn the art of filmmaking.

“I just wanted to learn how to be able to do all of this stuff so that maybe one day I could make a film that could have the impact on somebody that these films had on me,” he said.

Strand’s hope is that the film feels authentic.

“It was very important to me that if anybody had experienced active addiction, either firsthand or through a loved one, I wanted them to be able to watch this movie and know that it resonated truthfully,” he said.

For those unfamiliar with opioid abuse, Strand had other motivations.

“At its core, this is a love story,” he said. “The hope would be that within all of that grit and grime, that anybody could be able to watch this movie and relate to it. And, hopefully the next time they read about somebody overdosing, the next time they read about some sort of fentanyl bust, or the next time they hear that there’s a halfway house opening up down the street, they could imagine the characters Viv and Jay who they spent 90 minutes in a theater rooting for.”

With the U.S.’s ongoing opioid epidemic, Strand guesses most people are connected in some way to the realities of addiction.

“There’s hardly a person alive that hasn’t been touched by this force in our American society … but we rarely talk about it,” he said.

Throughout the process, strangers have pulled him aside to tell him privately how much the subject resonates with them.

“That was one of the things that was incredibly affirming – to feel that the film itself was making people feel safe to open up and share their own experiences,” he said.

The film benefits two Georgia nonprofit organizations. The first, Georgia Harm Reduction Coalition, is a statewide wellness organization that, among other things, helps individuals with substance use disorders by providing free Narcan (which reverses an overdose), clean syringes, counseling and information about medication-assisted treatment.

The second, Nuçi’s Space, is personal to Strand. The Athens-based nonprofit, which helps musicians and artists with brain illnesses like mental health diagnoses and addiction, gave Strand his first guitar lessons and helped him get connected with a local Suboxone doctor when he moved back to Athens from New York. He credits Nuçi’s Space with helping him succeed in recovery.

If you go

7 p.m. May 4. $18. (World premiere at 9 p.m. April 30 is sold out.) Tara Atlanta, 2345 Cheshire Bridge Road NE, Atlanta. 470-567-1968, atlantafilmfestival.com. Also available to stream online May 5-12 and showing at the Athens Film Festival Aug. 14-17.