My Friend Vince is a 1975 independent Canadian documentary film about a Toronto street hustler that interrogates the relationship of the filmmaker to his subject.
[1] The first-time director, David Rothberg,[2] made the film in collaboration with Howard Alk, an accomplished filmmaker from Chicago[3] who, at the time, was in Canada working on Janis, a documentary about the late Janis Joplin, for Crawley Films.
The film, which was shot in super 16mm black and white, was financed for less than $2,000, $1,200 of which was funded by the Canada Council for the arts.
Director and subject switch roles and, catalyzed by Alk's prompting, both discover that, all along, there was more than one con man at the table.
[5] Through the early 1980s it was taught as an example of "self-reflexive" cinema[6] in the curricula of various university film studies programs.