A Bullet Pulling Thread

In January 2020, in Lytton, BC, a man named Barry Shantz was shot dead by police, as he intended. The incident raises troubling questions about response protocols (why wasn’t a mental health worker dispatched to a stand-off which lasted several hours, for example?), and about institutional accountability. But Ian Daffern’s film gives us much more than this. It is a compassionate portrait of Barry, an imperfect man, a former drug dealer, who nevertheless turned his life around and became an advocate for fellow prisoners and for the homeless, as related by his sister, Marilyn, whose own life followed a very different path. In response to the tragedy, Marilyn creates a series of art quilts called Kairos – a Greek word which means “an opportune time for action”. A Bullet Pulling Thread opens up several pathways we might usefully follow.

Screening with the short film Violet Gave Willingly (Claire Sanford, 2022, 23 mins)

Jun 11: Q&A with Marilyn Farquhar and Deborah Dumka (Violet Gave Willingly)

By combining the stories of these two siblings and the many lives that Marilyn touches along the way, A Bullet Pulling Thread captures the need to correct the ways in which public bodies, namely law enforcement, deal with issues related to mental health… Daffern addresses related social causes like housing, addiction, and the rights of incarcerated people […] It’s a striking work that conveys her loss, but also the many lives affected by that single shot.

Pat Mullen, POV Magazine