Film portrays cancer fight

Five-year-old Grace Meyer has never known her mother without cancer.

“We haven’t had the death talk,” said Jenny Meyer, who has battled the illness since 2000. “She knows mom’s sick. It’s been her life. She wouldn’t know any different.”

Jenny Meyer was diagnosed with inflammatory breast cancer six years ago, only two months before finding out she was pregnant with Grace. Against the advice of doctors, she decided to have her child even while going through chemotherapy and a mastectomy.

The past three years of Meyer’s life with cancer are chronicled in a short documentary called “Jenny’s Journal,” which will play Thursday at the Idaho Panhandle International Film Festival in Sandpoint.

The film is the story of Meyer’s fight against cancer, the love of her daughter and husband and how she’s afraid to leave them, as well as her long-distance friendship with her college roommate.

Meyer said she agreed to the project mainly to give her family something to remember her by if she succumbs to the cancer.

She and the filmmaker, Jeff Bock, were in the Sandpoint High School graduating class of 1992 and had not spoken to each other since graduation, Bock said, until their former English teacher brought them together.

It was Marianne Love, now retired, who came up with the idea for the documentary. Love said she toyed with the idea of a documentary or television series about teachers who revisit former students to recall days in the classroom and see where the students have gone in the world.

She pitched it to Bock, who now lives in Los Angeles and works in the film business, about three years ago at a reunion of her former high school newspaper students.

“It was something we knew we could kind of do whenever I got back into town, which is about twice a year,” Bock said. “We did it because we felt we had to do something for Jenny. … You just kind of gravitate to her.”

Bock said he was unsure how the filming would go. Meyer had only a 5 percent chance of living five years or more, and she has surpassed that. But her health could have changed any year, any month, he said. There is no end in sight for her now, and the film depicts her discussing her goal to take Grace to her first day of kindergarten this fall.

The film includes footage of Meyer giving a speech at graduation as the class president at Sandpoint High. The curly, thick brown hair in the film is gone now – she wears a bandanna to cover her head. It’s not obvious she is sick and undergoes chemotherapy treatments every two weeks.

It was odd at first to be filmed, Meyer said, but she grew accustomed to it. It is obvious in the film that her husband, Jeff, is a bit camera shy. But Grace became a ham as time went on, Meyer said, and is a major reason why she continues to fight today.

Meyer reads her journal entries in the film – a way to help her open up. She discusses initial frustrations with her diagnosis, her mastectomy and what it was like to be told the cancer had spread from her breast to her liver and hip bone.

“It has been one week since my mastectomy,” she reads in the film. “I’ve never felt more ugly, more insecure, more scared.”

Bock whittled down 30 hours of footage to 26 minutes. Last year he put all the raw footage on a DVD to give to Meyer’s family.

The three will attend the Sandpoint screening, as will some of Meyer’s relatives. She might participate in a question-and-answer session afterward.

Bock has entered the film in about two dozen other festivals, he said. Its international debut was at the Calgary Fringe Festival, and the Sandpoint showing is the first in the U.S.

“I think it’s a huge steppingstone for his career,” Meyer said of Bock’s first try at documentary filmmaking.

Meyer said she hopes the film will help people who are coping with cancer keep their heads up, she said. And while her own journal depicts a woman who is at times scared of leaving loved ones, there is also strength in her words.

“I fear leaving Grace and Jeff,” she reads from another entry, “but I don’t fear death.”