The Little c is a documentary short I made for theatre company Complicité to accompany their collaboration with performance artist Bryony Kimmings. A Pacifist’s Guide To The War On Cancer was a new piece of music theatre that toured the UK in the winter of 2016. It drew inspiration from the real-life stories of cancer patients that the production team met during the creative process.
The original brief was to produce a behind the scenes documentary to accompany the show's London premiere. However, during the process of interviewing these real-life cancer patients, a narrative emerged that seemed more urgent and more compelling than a straight-forward BTS documentary.
The Little c became a film about the untold story of cancer. It uses the voices of its subjects to reveal sides to the cancer narrative that go largely undocumented. Although not comprehensive in any sense, The Little c shines a light on non-normative cancer experiences that go beyond those seen in the mainstream media.
Logline
Performance artist Bryony Kimmings and theatre company Complicité set out to make a musical about cancer. Armed with the surprising and unusual real-life stories of cancer patients, the team must find new ways to talk about a difficult subject.
Synopsis
The Little c tells the unexpected and untold story of cancer through the voices and stories of real-life cancer patients. It tracks these stories as they make their way from patient to stage as part of the 2016 musical A Pacifist’s Guide To The War On Cancer. The film follows the show's development from a coffee meeting in 2014 to a UK tour in 2016, and charts the creative team's efforts to bring a fresh voice to a difficult and loaded subject.
