A film showing life on the streets of a York estate premiered this week. Its director tells CHRIS TITLEY that we should do more to help the city's young and deprived.

YORK is the star of a million mini-movies. It is hard to walk around the city centre without encountering a happy couple panning a camcorder along Shambles or up the West Front of the Minster.

Travel away from the soft centre into the city's tougher outskirts and it's a different story. Housing estates which seem half a world away from the footstreets rarely figure on film.

But one man is changing that. By training his lens on York's hidden suburbs, director Kevin Curran exposes the very real problems tourists never see.

His previous documentary, Stranded: On Cloud Nine, followed three York heroin addicts struggling to cope with their addiction. Drugs figure largely in his latest work, Catch Me When I Fall, which was shown for the first time on Tuesday.

The title is explained by the opening line of the film. "When things get really hard, when people hit rock bottom, who's going to be there to catch them when they fall?"

Centred on Chapelfields, the film talks to some of those who are falling. David and Charlotte speak frankly about their heroin addiction. "It ruins your life totally," she says. "It ruins your outlook on life, everything."

David says he has had to "rob and steal every day" to feed his habit.

"I go into my kids' bedroom every night before I go to bed," Charlotte adds. "I look at my two kids, I feel so guilty.

"They have got plenty, my two, but what could they have had?"

Seventeen-year-old DJ, his head shrouded by the hood of his Nike jacket, tells Kevin he was bullied for five years from the age of nine. His uncle died "because he was on smack. I started crying and that". He has taken cocaine and amphetamines; not heroin as yet, but with its wide availability you can't help but fear he will be unable to resist its false promise of escape.

Catch Me When I Fall does not provoke despair, but anger. Anger that so many young people are trapped by their circumstances. Anger that these scenes could be shot on any similar estate in York - or in Britain. Anger that so many people from more fortunate backgrounds are quick to condemn these young people and slow to help them out.

This is best expressed by Chief Inspector Andy Bell of York police in the film. "Everyone says this is somebody else's problem," he says.

Kevin knows how hard it is to break free. He was one of 11 brothers and sisters who grew up in a rough area of Clifton, York. One morning in 1995, he came downstairs to discover his 13-year-old brother Declan had hanged himself to avoid facing the man who had sexually abused him in a court case.

Kevin dedicated his first film, Inner Sense, to Declan, and all his work is informed by his loss.

"For Declan, it's too late. We should appreciate and invest in young people," he said.

"It's all well and good judging their behaviour and reacting to it. As a society we need to be proactive. We need to change the pattern, rather than sweep away the problem.

"CCTV cameras will catch people committing a crime, but they won't stop them doing it. There's not enough interest in changing these lives."

Kevin is not a starry-eyed idealist. "I'm not making them all out to be Oliver Twists. But a lot of them are born into deprived circumstances, which affects their upbringing and how they turn out.

"There's a tendency to be defeatist, to label and criminalise young people. They're just kids. If you sit down and talk to them, they're great. They can open up to you. They're just human beings."

But aren't they to some extent authors of their own destinies? Don't they choose to take drugs? "I am not a great supporter of that theory. You don't get born into a situation where your parents take drugs by choice," said Kevin.

"Heroin is so easy to get hold of. It comes across your life. If a person's life is unstable, if they haven't got security and support in their life, and they start to take drugs, they're going to become more unstable."

He fears the problem will grow and deepen.

"I see the sheer destruction that drugs cause, and I see the young people from the next generation growing up more and more involved in drugs.

"It's a startling thing to think how big a problem it could get. It's important to intervene before it gets any further out of control."

He said Catch Me When I Fall has two aims: to generate debate and widen understanding of what drugs do to users. Kevin is arranging public screenings.

If he had political power, "the very first thing I would do is consult young people. What is it we can do to give them more opportunity.

"The second thing I would do is put money into mentoring schemes, such as Connexions. It helps young people to get on their feet."

One of the people he interviewed for the film is Rosie Wall, chair of Chapelfields Residents' Association. Her son Daniel was a heroin addict, murdered by a fellow junkie.

She was at the City Screen launch of Catch Me When I Fall. "It was fantastic. Kevin cares so much about the people that it's incredible really.

"It's not only Chapelfields where this is happening, it's every estate in England."

All of us have a role in tackling the problem, Rosie said. What can we do?

"The main thing is for the wider city to realise they are part of the community. We have to care about these people, and help them.

"On drugs awareness days I hope they will go and learn about drugs and what effect they have on people.

"If we try to understand them and their addiction, hopefully more people will want to help."

Kevin understands young drug users because he used to be one. As a teenager he took amphetamines and ecstasy to ease his pain. So he knows what the Chapelfields youngsters are up against.

"I was one of those yobs, one of the drug-involved loonies who get talked about in the paper. My life's a lot different now because people loved me, people talked to me, who wanted to help me.

"We have to offer these young people an opportunity to find a brighter future."

CATCH Me When I Fall was commissioned by City of York Council's Youth Service, in partnership with Connexions, and produced by Bright Sparks Media.

The powerful 20-minute film acknowledges the positive work undertaken by Compass Drug Services and the Youth Service in the Chapelfields area of York to support adults and young people dependent on drugs, as well as those around them affected by their addiction.

It began as a film charting the end of the successful needle exchange programme in Chapelfields, which stopped when the Home Office Communities Against Drugs funding came to an end. The programme is set to be revived soon.

But it soon evolved into something more. As well as recording people's views on drugs, the film focuses on the clinical services offered by Compass as well as highlighting the wider support available, such as a mums and tots group, a toy library, a job club and community IT facilities.

Rosie Wall, of Chapelfields Residents' Association, believes the area is on the up, with the building of the new Community House due to open in the summer.

Updated: 09:00 Thursday, February 17, 2005