The C Word

After her own cancer diagnosis, Meghan O'Hara turned the camera on the disease. She works through the film alongside David Servan-Schreiber, a neuroscientist who found out he had brain cancer while doing cancer research, listing the everyday Western habits the film associates with the illness: smoking, processed food, stress, inactivity, contaminants. Morgan Freeman narrates and is one of the producers. The argument is that cancer is something to be prevented and not only treated. The figure the film leans on, that seventy per cent of cancer deaths trace back to lifestyle, is disputed among researchers; the causal picture is less clean than it looks here, and prevention does not stand in for treatment in any case. This is a hopeful piece of advocacy rather than a medical guide.