Anonymous Sister

Anonymous Sister

“We call it an epidemic, like a disease, but this was a man-made disaster caused by greed” is not only one of the last things said in ‘Anonymous Sister’ but sums up director Jamie Boyle’s searingly personal documentary.

Through her relationship with her sister Jordan, who got off opioids a decade before this film was made, Boyle traces the rise of the crisis, breaking down its chilling history with easy to digest facts and figures. The crisis began in 1996 when they were children and Jordan started struggling with addiction in the mid-2000s right after Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family settled their first lawsuit (of many). In a tender prologue, Boyle says that their story could be anyone’s 25 years into an “epidemic that is shattering millions.”

Starting from when she picked up a camera in 1996 through 2019 whose significance she doesn’t reveal until the movie’s bittersweet ending Boyle uses home video footage along with new on camera interviews, archival home videos, news footage and audio, and other media to track both the crisis and her relationship with her sister. It also puts human faces to what could easily be viewed as cold history by matching footage from the crisis’ timeline with footage from her family’s home videos in an impressive editing feat.

‘Anonymous Sister’ would pair nicely with Laura Poitras’ Golden Lion-winning documentary ‘All The Beauty and The Bloodshed,’ about artist/activist/recovered opioid addict Nan Goldin. Both movies look at the crisis through a personal lens. While not as polished as Poitras’, what makes Boyle’s just as compelling is how it breaks down that so many everyday people become addicts not because they’re abusers like Purdue Pharma wants you to believe but because of how our broken healthcare system was gamed by corporate greed.

One sequence even has some of the same protest footage used in ‘All The Beauty and The Bloodshed’ from a demonstration outside the Met in New York where a mother talks about how her son, who died of an opiate overdose, was first prescribed opioids as a teenager after an injury playing high school sports. But she’s not pleading for people to care about him she says he’s one of half a million similar stories and that number should make you care.

Poitras is effective at portraying activism in action through this story, but its power is multiplied when viewed alongside Boyle’s sister’s experience. Jordan was on track to compete in the Olympics as a figure skater until she began suffering from nerve damage caused by the sport’s intense training regimen. She received her first Vicodin prescription at age 20, which eventually turned into two strengths of Percocet and an OxyContin addiction that left her unable to function.

By talking to her family and Kolodny, among others, Boyle investigates just how widespread it is for doses to be upped like this and why. One particularly damning sequence involves an interview with an ex-sales rep from Purdue Pharma who explains that dosing came from a sales strategy wherein the company targeted family doctors and general practitioners, pushing them to prescribe higher and higher amounts of the drug. Even those already familiar with such corruption will find it infuriatingly simple and understand just how much Purdue’s marketing has shaped American medicine.

Boyle structures her movie like a home video, and her use of tracking forward and tracking backward through the sisters’ storylines, as well as the crisis’, is devastatingly effective. Particularly when coupled with the way she deploys archival footage showing how news media covered (or didn’t cover) first opioid painkillers as a “miracle” drug, then switched to covering a nation in crisis. She also contrasts some of the harshest language blaming “criminals” or “abusers” with home video of her younger sister when she was still healthy.

But perhaps Boyle uses this technique most effectively after she’s shown a montage of how misinformation from a Purdue produced PSA what Kolodny calls “brilliant marketing disguised as education” gets disseminated throughout news coverage. Then she cuts to home video footage of her sister saying she’s studying mass communications: “It’s all about media and how it affects us. It’s so interesting,” Jordan says.

Boyle acknowledges that she is making media herself and never tries to hide her personal connection to this crisis. While there are interviews with experts to support the family narrative, there is a righteous anger coursing through every fact and historical account. And the fact that all of these interviews with survivors from some of the most hard-hit states like Oklahoma and West Virginia were conducted during the Trump administration (aka the era of “fake news”) only deepens the documentary’s hopelessness.

But when nearly 50,000 people a year in this country are dying from a crisis created by one company’s greed over decades, under four different presidents’ watchs, can we still afford to be objective?

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