
Cold Turkey
Lanre Fehintola is a photojournalist who first fell into heroin use while researching a book about addicts, an experience he wrote up in his memoir Charlie Says Don't Get High on Your Own Supply. Filmmaker Leo Regan had already documented five years of that addiction in Don't Get High on Your Own Supply; this follow-up picks up a year later, after Fehintola has relapsed, and stays with him as he tries to get clean by quitting outright, without medical taper or rehab. The camera sits through the physical wreckage of withdrawal, the sweating, cramping, and sleeplessness, alongside the psychological unraveling that goes with it. What complicates the film is Regan and Fehintola's history: they are not strangers meeting for a documentary but two men who have already spent years working together, and the film keeps returning to what that closeness does to the footage, whether a friend behind the camera can still be a fair witness, and whether filming someone's collapse is itself a kind of intervention or a betrayal.