Yellow Springs News Online

Documentary to debut at Sundance

“A Lion in The House,” a documentary about childhood cancer by Yellow Springs filmmakers Steve Bognar and Julia Reichert, has been accepted at the Sundance Film Festival, where it will have its world premiere next month.

Six-year-old Alex zooms around on her Big Wheels trike when she’s not receiving chemotherapy in the hospital. Fifteen-year-old Tim takes care of his little brother and likes to shop at Nike Town after his hair grows back from the radiation treatments. On the good days, when their cancer hasn’t got them down, Jen, 7, plays baseball, Al, 12, plays basketball, and Justin, 16, jokes with his family and talks of never giving up the fight against his disease.

The challenge of childhood cancer is told through these five children and their families in the new documentary film, A Lion in the House, by local filmmakers Julia Reichert and Steve Bognar.

The film, which was accepted last week to the 2006 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, where it will premiere next month, turned into something neither filmmaker expected when they began the project in 1997, they said. The intimate connections they made with the families in their film, they said, affected them in ways they hope others who experience the film will feel as well.

When Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center approached Reichert and Bognar about making a film about childhood cancer, neither was sure about reentering the familiar world of hospitals, doctors and disease. Reichert’s teenage daughter, Lela Reichert-Klein, had gone through treatment for Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and Reichert didn’t want to relive those fears, she says in the beginning of the film. But almost immediately, Reichert and Bognar began to care for the families on the cancer floor at Children’s, and it wasn’t long before they were part of the long moving train that consumes for many years the lives of those touched by cancer.

For Reichert, an Antioch College graduate, filmmaking is only half about telling stories. The other half, she said, is about activism and making social change. The main reasons to make a movie about cancer would be to help people, familiar with the disease or not, to better understand and deal with the process. But few people get excited about the thought of watching a movie about children struggling with a sometimes fatal disease, which is why Reichert and Bognar were thrilled when the community activist arm of PBS, Independent Television Service, agreed to take on the film.

In addition to its airing on PBS as a two-part four hour series next June, ITVS and the filmmakers have coordinated a national community engagement campaign to “galvanize public attention around childhood cancer” and spark a dialogue about how to connect families and caregivers with networks of healthcare support, according to the ITVS Web site.

The campaign has already begun, and both Reichert and Bognar, as well as Karen Durgans, the full-time outreach coordinator for A Lion in the House, have been traveling from city to city to present clips of the film to health care and social service providers and to facilitate dialogue around issues such as socioeconomic disparities in health care and disease outcomes, how to distinguish between giving up and letting go and bereavement issues, as well as long-term survivorship issues and return to normalcy.

Last year, the success of the campaign led to a total of $100,000 in grant money donated by the Lance Armstrong Foundation and ITVS to 10 communities around the country to continue local outreach activities around the film. Also in 2004, the National Cancer Institute invited the filmmakers as part of a lecture series in Bethesda, Md., related to cancer health disparities and ways to use the film to help accomplish its mission to eliminate death and suffering due to cancer by 2015.

Getting the film seen by the most people possible so that solutions could begin to take shape meant chipping away at the 525 hours of intense life-and-death footage to make a succinct four-hour film that could draw a PBS audience for the first half and bring people back the next night for part two, the filmmakers said. Not only had Reichert, a professor with Wright State’s motion pictures department, and Bognar, an Ohio Arts Council artist, taken leave from their jobs to capture every precious moment, but the families had allowed themselves to be exposed, all in the interest of the film.

“It was probably the hardest filmmaking decision I’ve ever made in my life,” Reichert said. Bognar said that losing footage they had grown attached to was very painful. However, he said, letting go of the details to better serve the narrative drive changed the film from a documentary into a story.

The film also gets stronger movie status now that it has been selected from a pool of 3,148 submissions as one of the 64 features to compete for a prize at Sundance, Bognar said. It is one of 15 documentaries, chosen from 1,208 entries.

“Cancer is a subject that scares a lot of people, and to be picked at a major film festival frames the subject as a movie, and I hope helps people to see it as a story,” he said. “Even the best stories are sometimes difficult to deal with emotionally. This legitimizes the movie in a big way.”

After eight years of filming and following the stories of Alex, Tim, Jen, Al and Justin, Reichert and Bognar in the last few weeks have begun to show the film in its final stages of production to the patients and their families. The film follows Alex through her end of treatment dance party, multiple relapses and the conflict between her parents who disagree on when medical treatment stops helping Alex and instead begins to hurt her. The film captures Tim’s denial and lack of support from his family and the medical establishment’s challenge to compensate for the inequities of patients with limited resources.

The film also shows tender moments between Al and his mother, the lion in their house who will do absolutely anything to support her child’s recovery. Jen’s mom runs a marathon to raise money for the Leukemia Society and faces her own fears as she helps her daughter and their family adjust to a life after cancer.

Reichert and Bognar said they hope to take all five of the families to the Sundance Festival to witness the premiere of the film they made together. The filmmakers are requesting donations of frequent flier miles to help about 12 family members to be there for the screening.

Reichert and Bognar also said they feel blessed by the generosity of the 150 or so people, many of them from Yellow Springs, who have donated hundreds of hours to watch and comment on the film and provided months of free housing to visiting editors. In addition, local editors Jim Klein, Dan Misch, Susan Murphy and Sharon Wescott have also worked tirelessly on the film, they said.

“This film owes so much to the Yellow Springs community, and we’re so lucky to have that kind of generosity in town,” Bognar said.

Reichert and Bognar hope to have a local premiere of the film in Yellow Springs sometime, perhaps this spring or summer, they said.

Anyone wishing to donate frequent flier miles to the families can contact Karen Durgans at 767-1924.