The Cancer Journals Revisited

98 min. digital film, 2018

Women Make Movies Catalog

The Cancer Journals Revisited is prompted by the question of what it means to re-visit and re-vision Black lesbian feminist poet Audre Lorde’s classic 1980 memoir of her breast cancer experience today. At the invitation of the filmmaker, who was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2010, twenty-seven writers, artists, activists, health care advocates, and current and former patients recite Lorde’s manifesto aloud on camera, collectively dramatizing it and producing an oration for the screen. The film is both a critical commentary and a poetic reflection upon the precarious conditions of survival within the intimate and politicized public sphere of illness.

“The film is an ode to this breaking of silence — for Lorde, for the women interviewed, and for the filmmaker Lin, who eventually reveals her own cancer diagnosis.” Beandrea July, Hyperallergic

“This joining together of individuals in a united, radical act of care, is akin to what Lana Lin achieves with her film. Utilizing a non-narrative, poetic approach to the documentary form, the filmmaker channels a plurality of lived, felt experiences into a collective act of better world building.” Amber Power, Bomb