TORONTO STAR | 11 JANUARY 2017

"Toronto film critics gave Hugh Gibson’s The Stairs, about habitual drug users in the city’s Regent Park community, the award for best homegrown feature on Tuesday night."

Oscar-nominated filmmaker Sarah Polley, who announced the winner, called The Stairs, “a huge contribution to the country and to everybody.”

“Because it’s shining a light on something we don’t see and that’s so shockingly inspiring, what these subjects of the documentary are doing, in terms of giving back to their community while facing their own struggles,” she said in an interview.

GLOBE & MAIL | 9 MAR 2022

THE 20 BEST TORONTO FILMS EVER MADE

“I’m unsure that there is a Toronto film as empathetic, as deeply human, as Hugh Gibson’s The Stairs. Shot over the course of five years, the documentary follows three residents of the stigmatized Regent Park neighbourhood – a community outreach worker, a former sex worker, and a drug addict – as they struggle on the road to recovery. Generous and devoid of easy gawking, Gibson’s work is unforgettable.”

NOW MAGAZINE | 5 DEC 2019

THE 10 BEST TORONTO MOVIES OF THE DECADE

#2 THE STAIRS

“Gibson’s sensitive and powerful observational doc, an outgrowth from community-made educational videos, spans years as it follows recovering addicts who educate others on harm-reduction while the Regent Park “revitalization” plays out as a tragically fitting metaphor. Subjects Marty, Greg and Roxanne try to build their world back up as the environment around them crumbles.”

MUBI NOTEBOOK | 21 AUG 2018

"The Canadian filmmaker discusses his feature debut, a compassionate, unvarnished look at the lives of drug users in urban Toronto.

Hugh Gibson’s feature film debut represents the arrival of a major new voice in documentary filmmaking. The Stairs is a compassionate, unvarnished look at the lives of drug users in urban Toronto—their struggles to help themselves and one another, to change their lives for the better, and above all to maintain dignity in a society that often seems to prefer their invisibility. Gibson’s film avoids the pat narratives and uplifting bromides so often associated with this genre, instead preferring to allow the subjects to speak for themselves. His camera is curious and non-judgmental. Applying a style that is equal parts Errol Morris and Allan King, Gibson combines free observation with direct testimony to produce a vital document of a culture all around us. It’s a community that some of us may at one time have been a part of, one that others of us seldom see."

LITTLE WHITE LIES | 3 AUG 2018

"How The Stairs provides an honest insight into drug addiction. Hugh Gibson's 2016 documentary is a sensitive and important portrait.

In the space of only a few years, English-Canadian cinema has evolved into what some critics – and the streaming platform MUBI, with its special curated season ‘Canada’s Next Generation’ – have called a new wave. Young directors... have been delivering bold short or feature films that feel particularly fresh and seem to come out of nowhere, especially for spectators from abroad.

One such discovery is Hugh Gibson, who with his 2016 documentary The Stairs makes a vital and emotional feature debut that, like most of the other films in MUBI’s eye-opening selection, is both Canadian at its core and of universal appeal."

REVERSE SHOT | 12 APR 2018

"...Gibson invites us to witness these spaces as its displaced residents would, this so-called “City within a Park” now seeming haunted by all that is unrepresentable within it: the dispersal of the low-income residents that once occupied the space and the eradication of their culture to establish this would-be haven. The marks and presses on the faces of the outreach workers index the abuses perpetrated in this neighborhood, long after this environment itself is purged from the urban landscape. As Greg engages in protracted legal battle with the police officers who assaulted him, his only evidence of the event is a polaroid of the aftermath and a permanent, nasty scar on the side of his face. Similarly, Marty’s apartment, with its cloistered bric-a-brac, memorializes the area, those who’ve passed away (their funeral cards and obituaries scattered across his fridge) and his own advances over time (the hundreds of Bob Marley T-shirts in his closet, bought with the money he would’ve used to purchase crack).

CINEMA SCOPE | 24 MARCH 2017

"Gibson has called The Stairs a “harm-reduction film,” referring to an intervention strategy that aims not at a total cessation of drug use, but something more dynamic and nuanced: a forgoing of short-term solutions by recognizing that addicts are in it for the long haul, rather aiming to minimize harm for both users and their communities.... But The Stairs isn’t a social worker’s manifesto or a recruitment ad; rather, it’s a serious effort to reckon with harm reduction as a storytelling strategy—a way of thinking about addicts, whether currently using or sober, as people with still-evolving narrative trajectories and voices worth hearing, regardless of where they’re standing on the staircase at any given time."

Hugh gibson | DIRECTOR

A graduate of York University and alumni of the Berlinale Talent Campus, TIFF Talent Lab and TIFF Studio. Selected credits include writing/directing the acclaimed short drama, Hogtown Blues (’04: TIFF, Audience Award winner at Zinebi Bilbao Film Festival). He produced feature doc, A Place Called Los Pereyra (’09: IDFA, RIDM, BAFICI), which screened extensively in Latin America and Canada, and produced short doc A Tomb with a View (’14: TIFF, VIFF, Hamburg). The Stairs is his feature debut as director. He lives in Toronto.