Out of all the various styles and genre of film, for me none is more powerful than a documentary touching on social themes through a uniquely personal lens. In the early nineties, on a bored Sunday afternoon I was channel surfing when I came across just such a film. I have racked my brains and done many searches, all in vain, and I'll be damned if I can remember the name of the film.

At any rate, it was a film about an elderly homeless man, a drunk, living on Toronto's streets. It was gritty, powerful, and through what it tried to do, and eventually succeeded in doing, it was profoundly life changing. Both for its subject, and for this viewer anyway.

The filmmaker followed the man for over a year as he went from hitting rock bottom living on the streets in the early stages of liver failure, and followed the man through several failed attempts at rehab, and the eventual painful reuniting with the son he had walked out on at birth. It was a tough, bleak, and often unappealing thing to watch, and the man was often hard to like.

Then close to the end of the filming, something happened. Through his son, this man realized what he had wasted for all those years. He went back to rehab, and he made it stick. The film ends with the man happy, clean, sober and employed full time as a waiter at his local diner. And beginning to make up for a lifetime of disconnection and regret. A rare occurrence to be sure, but I so admire the vision of that film maker in documenting that rare doesn't have to mean never.

The following Eric Clapton hit was played several times throughout the film, and it worked in very powerful ways as the thematic backdrop to many of the harder to view scenes. To this day I will always get misty whenever, and wherever I hear it, as it does an exacting job of completely humanizing its subject.