A new film by Helen Slinger for CBC’s Firsthand. Watch the trailer Now.
Vancouver International Airport – YVR – is familiar territory for Curt Petrovich. As a CBC News national reporter on the West Coast since 2005, he uses YVR as a portal into the world’s disaster zones and back home again to his young family. Petrovich has travelled through YVR to African refugee camps, Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines, the Fukishima nuclear disaster. He always came home safe. Or so he thought until 2014 – the year he crashed with PTSD and began courageously rebuilding himself from the inside out. In the process, he gained profound insight into a story he had never been able to let go of – the 2007 Taser death of Robert Dziekanski at YVR. This film reveals as yet unseen layers of the Dziekanski story while taking the audience inside the experience of PTSD from the perspective of a well-known Canadian journalist.