Film project centres the lives of young people killed by fentanyl |
Mary Fairhurst Breen’s daughter Sophie loved the theatre. “Our happy place was in a car on overnight theatre excursions,” Breen narrates over a stop-motion animated short film.
The film is part of We Were Here, a documentary project Breen created to centre the lives of young people killed by fentanyl. Sophie died of an overdose in 2020 at age 27.
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Combining oral history with animation and music, the series features 10 short films about Ontarians under 30 who were poisoned by fentanyl between 2019 and 2023. Breen narrates the films and offers an intimate portrait of who each person was to their loved ones. She says she wanted to focus “on the lives they lived. Even if they were very brief, some as brief as 16 years, rather than just focusing on the cause of death.”
Before Sophie died, Breen had been working on a memoir, consulting both of her daughters throughout the process. After losing Sophie, Breen continued writing, releasing her memoir Any Kind of Luck at All in 2021. She contributed radio essays to CBC and a piece for Briarpatch about Sophie that described her death as both sudden and the result of a long illness (she was diagnosed with anxiety, depression and PTSD in 2013). Breen also co-wrote a Globe and Mail essay with her eldest daughter Emma, examining their decision........