Addiction is so pernicious that even expensive rehab clinics have high relapse rates. But “The Breakthrough Group,” a new documentary short from director Ben Rekhi, looks at a Salt Lake City program that boasts a higher-than-average success rate — and where participants pay with work and commitment, not cash.
The film looks at a few days at The Other Side Academy, where executive director Dave Durocher — who himself got sober after spending 27 years in and out of prison — guides participants with ironclad principles that stress honesty and accountability.
The program isn’t a short-term rehab, but rather a therapeutic community where participants make at least a 30-month commitment to live on-site and make what the community calls a “commitment to a deeply rigorous process of personal change.”
Strikingly, the program works without accepting any money from the government, insurance companies, participants, or their families. Instead, they pay their way through jobs that include a moving business and thrift boutique. There are no medical professionals on-site: The progress is led by other people in recovery.
The film, which premiered in July at the Indy Shorts Film Festival, gives an up-close look at participants’ struggles — and successes. It provides a gritty, fly-on-the-wall approach to the minute-by-minute mechanics of the program, but also shows the work paying off, by bringing stability and peace to the people who take part.
Rekhi is an award-winning filmmaker who, after working in the camera department of the Coen Brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou, was hired by one of the film’s stars, George Clooney, to shoot behind-the-scenes footage for Clooney’s directorial debut, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. Rekhi went on to produce the Independent Spirit Award-nominated Bomb the System and direct the SXSW Audience Award winner Waterborne, then spent five years at film finance company IM Global.
He returned to directing with The Ashram, a spiritual thriller starring Academy Award Winner Melissa Leo, Kal Penn, and Radhika Apte. His latest film, The Reunited States, a documentary executive produced by Van Jones and Meghan McCain, focused on healing American divisions and premiered on PBS in 2022. He is now in post-production on Last Man In Tower, based on Aravind Adiga’s book.
We talked with Rekhi, Durocher and Joseph Grenny, an author of bestselling business books who co-founded The Other Side Academy after striking up a friendship with a Utah County Jail inmate who had read one of his books and was determined to turn his life around.
Grenny’s own family had dealt with the horror of addiction, so he brought firsthand knowledge of how hard it is to escape.
Ben Rekhi, Joseph Grenny and Dave Burocher on The Other Side Academy and ‘The Breakthrough Group’
MovieMaker: Ben, how did you become a filmmaker? What led you to this story?
Ben Rekhi: As a kid of the 90s, I started out making adventure and sci-fi films with my friends in our backyards. But after going to film school in New York, I came out producing and directing primarily indie dramas. I shifted into documentaries after 2016, to use cinema as a way to bridge divides across our divisions. A journalist I met along the way had written about the Other Side Academy, this powerful community that uses these intense interventions to give hope to people who had all but given up on themselves. Their bold approach was producing real results.
As someone who had struggled with addiction and depression myself, I reached out to Joseph and Dave and said “Hey, I think what you’re doing here can really help other people who are struggling.”
MovieMaker: Joseph and Dave, how did you come to found a therapeutic community? What makes it different from a rehab clinic?
Joseph Grenny: I felt it important to start The Other Side Academy because the current rehab system is deeply flawed. There is zero accountability for outcomes, no transparency, and frankly, a system that destroys hope by producing so many failures. There are good people in it, but it is a bad system. Then it hit close to home for me.
First one, then another of our boys became addicted to drugs and began cycling through the criminal justice system. We got a closer view of how those who are arrested once almost inevitably get arrested again and again. It’s a perfect system for creating criminals. At the time, our boys had no interest in help from mom and dad. We decided if we couldn’t fight the battle we wanted, we’d get into the war. The Other Side Academy is the war.
Dave Durocher: I had spent 27 years in and out of prison for hardcore drug addiction, drug-dealing and gun-running. After a high-speed chase with the police ended that whole lifestyle for me, I wrote a letter to another therapeutic community, Delancey Street in San Francisco, and they accepted me.
So instead of doing another 22 year prison sentence, I stayed eight and a half years in a program that ended up being one of the best decisions I ever made. I was asked to manage it for the last five years I was there.
Meanwhile Joseph had researched Delancey street for a book he was writing, and became fascinated at how effective it was at reducing recidivism. So when he decided he wanted to start something similar in Utah, he called and asked if I’d be interested in running it with him. Hence the birth of the Other Side Academy.
MovieMaker: What makes it different than a rehab clinic?
Dave Durocher: Number one, we don’t take any money from the government, city, county, state, federal government, insurance, parents, nothing. Which is really important because in most treatment facilities, you have to leave the day the funding runs out. 30 day programs and have only a 3% success rate. At the Other Side Academy, we’re a minimum 30 months long, but you can stay longer. And the reason why you can stay longer is there’s no funding source attached to it. The longer you’re in treatment, the better your odds of success. You can stay until you’ve actually recalibrated your moral compass.
MovieMaker: What kind of person attends?
Joseph Grenny: Our average participant has been arrested 25 times and has had decades of drug abuse and criminal behavior.
Dave Durocher: It’s the long-term drug addict, coupled with a criminal piece, so we know that’s a difficult population to help. Do we have people here that have never been incarcerated? Yes, but very few. The vast majority of people who come to us have been situationally homeless. In some cases, chronically homeless, long-term substance abuse issues and criminal behavior. That’s the profile of a student.
MovieMaker: With a documentary like this, you’re always balancing showing the benefits of a program like this with respecting the privacy of the patients. The last thing you want is for the added pressure of a film crew to contribute to a relapse. How did you make sure everyone was always comfortable on camera, and with the project as a whole?
Ben Rekhi: This was actually the most delicate aspect of making this film. We were interacting with people at very sensitive stages of recovery, and we’d never want our presence to have any adverse effects on their journey. Initially, that meant identifying people who were a little bit further into their stay, who had pushed through some of the hard times already and had more growth under their belt.
Then, while filming with them, we were constantly asking “Is this OK?” or “Do you feel comfortable?” so that people had off-ramps if needed. To their credit, the students understood that the more honest and vulnerable they were, the more it would help and inspire other people. In a way, participating in the film became a way of giving back. Our guiding principle was always to portray stories of transformation in order to give hope to other people who are suffering.
MovieMaker: What was the biggest challenge in making this film and how did you overcome it?
Ben Rekhi: The two major challenges were building trust for the shoot and staying honest in the edit. There’s a great deal of trust that has to be earned between filmmaker and subject, so in the initial stages, I took a couple of trips to the Academy by myself without a camera or crew. I ate meals with everyone. I went along with people to work. I slept at the facility.
It was important to me that Joseph, Dave, and the students could spend uninterrupted time with me to understand my intentions. By the time we came back for the shoot, everyone felt very natural and didn’t really notice the camera or crew. As with any documentary, things would just happen and we’d have to be flexible enough to just start following the story as it unfolded.
The edit is always a challenge because there’s the ideas you have in your head before you shoot, and there’s the situations you actually ended up filming, and those are often very different. We knew we wanted to portray the beauty and hope of the Academy, but we also knew we couldn’t sugarcoat just how difficult the recovery process is.
Rehabilitation is seldom a straight line, and not everyone gets better. It became really important to portray the challenges of this reality, so as to earn trust of the viewer too.
MovieMaker: Joseph and Dave, what’s the biggest challenge of running a therapeutic community and how do you overcome it? How do you measure success?
Joseph Grenny: We measure success very simply — what percentage of our students achieve being DCE: drug-free, crime-free and employed long-term. Those should be the measures that any self-respecting organization holds itself up against.
Are we perfect? Absolutely not. But we aim at that North star every day and we’re transparent with the public about our successes and failures. The biggest challenge of running a therapeutic community is developing leadership that comes from within that is willing to live at the high moral level required for deep change.
Dave Durocher: Agreed, the biggest challenge is finding the leadership, because academics can’t run a facility like this. We don’t have doctors or counselors here. We are run exclusively by people with lived experience. People who have been through the same situations the students are going through. Finding and building those people into leaders is really difficult.
We started as a diversion program right when we opened in 2015. We talked to the judges and the courts, and still to this day, we take people pre-sentence in lieu of a lengthy county, state, or a prison sentence. The longer you are in treatment, the better your odds of success.
MovieMaker: Can you explain how people pay for the program?
Joseph Grenny: The Other Side Academy is free and self-sustaining. Our social enterprises generate enough to sustain our 250 students which allows them to stay not just as long as funding allows, but as long as they need to.
Dave Durocher: We generate all of our own revenue through our businesses that we own and operate. The moving company, the storage facility, the thrift boutique, and the construction company. The students work at these enterprises from day one, and that gives them the runway to stay as long as they need to.
MovieMaker: What do you all hope this film will accomplish?
Ben Rekhi: There are so many people struggling with addiction, depression, or negative thoughts and behaviors in our society. If not you directly, probably a family member or friend is. Our hope is that the film can help us all feel less alone and to realize change is possible.
We’re also exploring if the film can be a conversation starter around rehabilitation, recidivism, and mental health more broadly. It’s a snapshot of a facility that’s trying new solutions to some of society’s greatest ills, and with extraordinary results.
The national recidivism rate (or the return-to-prison rate) is close to 70%, but for graduates of the Other Side Academy, it’s under 20%. That kind of change doesn’t happen overnight, but it is possible. It just takes community, accountability, and a lot of hard work.
Joseph Grenny: We always hope for two things: Number one that more people make it to our bench who would benefit from The Other Side Academy, and number two, that our challenge for greater accountability and transparency, helps improve the entire system.
Dave Durocher: I hope the film informs people that there is a place you can go to get help that is long-term and doesn’t cost any money. People are going in and out of 30-day rehabs without making any lasting progress, and it’s costing either them or the system a fortune. We have facilities in Salt Lake and Denver, and are exploring bringing the model to a lot of other cities.
“The Breakthrough Group” plays the Nuart Theater in Los Angeles September 19-26th.
Main image: The Other Side Academy participants Nick Hendrickson and Tavita Moala in a scene from “The Breakthrough Group.” Courtesy of the filmmaker.