Is there a single person out there who did not try to hang off from the back of a cart and just roll while shopping for groceries? Now imagine taking that cart to a hilltop and starting from there. Scary, right? No proper steering or brakes, just what you can manage by your shoes. As long as your shoes can take the abuse.

That was a seemingly hardly known pastime of a small group of homeless people in the 1990s and early 2000s in North Vancouver, BC. There’s a documentary about it titled Carts of Darkness by Murray Siple. It’s freely available on YouTube.

Beware there are spoilers below.

The carts come into the picture as we get to know how these people live off the streets. Their main income is from collecting cans and bottles. The perfect tool for that is a shopping cart. You roll by and pick up what you find.

But they didn’t stop there. Occasionally they ride the carts as a sport. For fun, for the thrill of it. You could say riding a shopping cart at 60-70 kilometers an hour is dangerous and irresponsible, but isn’t that part of the motivation for every extreme sport?

The director really went out of his way to connect with the characters of his movie: Big Al, Fergie, Bob, Geordie, Little Al, Max and Buckles. It feels like the connection was first and the film came second. He certainly had his personal reasons to reach out. I don’t want to spoil everything from the movie, so I’m not telling you why, but it becomes clear quickly how his feelings of being marginalized and losing the options he was used to is the base for their special connection.

He clearly gains their trust. They are willing to show him and his camera their daily life. How they get by. Where do they find rest. Their struggle with addiction or the law. The happy moments too. A grill together. Meeting old friends. Finding a safe place. And of course the adrenaline rush of riding the cart. Their sense of freedom.

North Vancouver offers plenty of opportunity for cart riding. The long straight roads of the North American grid mildly ignoring the topography are great to speed together with the cars but with no steering wheel. People with money take their mountain bikes, skis and snowboards a bit further into the mountains to dedicated trails and slopes. But one without a penny to rent a car or having lost his license uses what’s at hand: the streets and the stolen carts.

Despite driving a van the filmmaker is bound to the city streets just as well as the others. He is exploring how to remember some of the rush he lost long ago, regaining his sense of freedom. It is a brave experiment which I hope worked out for him.

This documentary gave me a glimpse into many things unknown to me. Other than a brief excursion into piloting a glider I never was into extreme sports. Nor did I have a connection to the homeless or people living with serious disabilities.

I do love better-than-fiction documentaries for what they are. A gem found by people far away, who were kind enough to share their fascination with me. This movie did give me something I could have never imagined if it wasn’t real. (Another time I should collect a few of the best I know from this category and write a post about them too.)

Give it a watch. Then thank the kind stranger making this movie.

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Carts of Darkness directed by Murray Siple: IMDb, YouTube

carts of darkness poster