Synopsis
Marie-Philip is a PhD student and part-time professor who loves cats and Harry Potter. But one week before her 29th birthday, she is diagnosed with breast cancer. For a year, without false modesty, we follow her through each step as she confides in us with shocking honesty. An ode to life, to courage and to the resilience of all those who fight every day against disease.
A word from Tënk
After dazzling the film world with her first three films, director Geneviève Dulude-De Celles returned in 2023 with the luminous documentary Days. With this film, she casts a gaze full of empathy and restraint on the breast cancer diagnosis and treatment of Marie-Philip, a 28-year-old PhD student, almost 29. But what truly interests her here is life itself. From the opening sequence, using footage Marie-Philip filmed herself on her cellphone—complete with uneven audio—the director plunges with her into the distress of her first meeting with her doctor. She then immediately shifts into a reverse-chronological portrait of the young woman, allowing us to get to know her—quickly, and intimately—from the present back to her childhood, through other phone recordings and family films. This overview creates an instant sense of sorority and sympathy, all the more poignant as she experiences this during the COVID-19 pandemic, which—one can imagine—brings its own share of stress.
The recordings made by Marie-Philip allow her to maintain control over what’s happening to her, while also enabling the filmmaker to respect the young woman’s physical and mental space. At the same time, Dulude-De Celles structures her journey through contextual scenes and images that lend the film an unexpected poetry—fragments of daily life, trying on wigs, microscopic images of cancer cells and the circulatory system, trees rustling in the night. Though Marie-Philip confesses that she doesn’t want to talk about her illness in public, she hides nothing from the director’s camera or her own phone—her highs and lows, every step of her treatment, from injections to the removal of her breasts—as well as her vulnerability, candor and naiveté, her quirks, humor, and fears. The result is a truth that fascinates and unsettles, that challenges and shocks, that moves and disturbs. A concentrated dose of life, in a year of illness and hope—containing all that is beautiful, and all that can be ugly. In short, all that is essential.
Claire Valade
Critic and programmer
