Multi-disciplinary French artist Prune Nourry has gained international recognition for her thought-provoking, educational, and often humorous projects exploring bioethics through sculpture, video, photography, and performance. At the young age of 31, Prune is diagnosed with breast cancer. She starts documenting her treatment and its effect on her own body, turning her medical odyssey into a disarmingly intimate artistic undertaking that leads her to find new meaning in her work and its serendipitous relationship to her own survival.
“Serendipity” is a real and very personal look at the upside and downside of cancer. World-famous artist Nourry Prune takes us along her journey from the diagnosis of breast cancer to the rearrangement of priorities and the acceptance that everything happens for a reason.
As Nourry starts her cancer journey, she shares with her mom the realization that she must be prepared for every step in the process to help alleviate any fears and maintain a certain amount of control in order to maintain balance in her world as an artist and a cancer patient. From the beginning of the treatment with chemo sessions, she confronts the fear of losing her hair by cutting off her long ponytail and then eventually cutting all her hair off and makes fun of her new look in the process. She shares the event of a panic attack at one session and how she felt she could no longer breathe, overwhelmed by the unknown that she faced and the success of the treatment. At the same time, she drifts back to the past and has memories of a research video she produced years earlier and how seemingly life was imitating art and she was the primary subject of her own past. In a 2009 procreative dinner, she revisited the memories of dining on pieces of food-modeled anatomy that would now serve as part of the reconstruction phase of her own mastectomy.
The more Nourry took control of her cancer journey, the stronger she became in creating pieces of art that transformed her own fears and definition of beauty. Her projects depicted needles of transformation and various phases of the acceptance of her body as the world’s stage and the female’s body as a whole, a continuous forming work of art. She communicated freely with her doctors and family to form an alliance of strength that transformed her illness into a necessary part of her growth as a human and as an artist.
“Serendipity” shows how one woman’s belief in herself and total trust in her doctors was an integral part of the healing process as was an attitude of positivity that forced her to continue living a normal life in spite of the abnormality within her body. Nourry learned that “Once you accept what is going on, life becomes easier.” Her living art is a personal dedication to all the women warriors with themes such as “Holy River,” “Destruction Is Not an End,” and “The Amazon.” Executive Producer Angelina Jolie did an excellent job in showing every aspect of Nourry’s journey, both good and bad and how taking control on your own terms will help anyone who is faced with this crossroad to alleviate a lot of their fears and find some good in the midst of the transformation.
In select theaters Friday, October 18th
