The young Californian director and visual artist, Kailee McGee, presents another autobiographical work at SXSW, starting from her battle against cancer to tell the courage of being oneself, in one’s fears, in one’s vulnerabilities as well as in one’s strength. Already five years ago, with the short film The Person I Am When None is Looking (2019), she had narrated the identity crisis of the 21st century through a commentary on social media and on the fragmented aspects that we show of ourselves: “None wants to see the whole real you, they just want to see you in parts: edited, cropped, laughed, smiling, self-aware, captioned”.
A work that made meta-cinema and autobiographism a strong point, in the narration not only of the protagonist’s life as an artist but also of the genesis of the work itself, divided into emblematic chapters representing keywords of modern existence: Vulnerability, Confidence, Connection. Her being a visual artist in a world that revolves around vision allowed for a much more effective conveyance of discourse, given that “On the internet, nobody knows that you’re a performance artist. I’m a performance artist, but we’re all performance artists, just trying to figure out who we really are.” Already in this work, Kailee McGee demonstrated a completely personal style, able to address pressing and serious issues with self-irony and lightness.
The fact that she managed not to lose this light-hearted and amusing touch even in the painful depth of the story of her battle against advanced-stage breast cancer is a demonstration of enormous artistic stature, as well as – obviously – human. Can does not dwell solely on the struggle against the disease. It starts from this and from the initial sense of shame towards one’s own illness (“I don’t want anyone to know, it’s freaking embarrassing. What a mess…”) to investigate the identity issue underlying physical changes, the fear of one’s health, and the difficulty of showing vulnerability to others.
Kailee uses her art to do this and give meaning to her journey, which is inseparable from the narrative itself (“I want my art to mean something, I want my life to mean something”) in a short film that is meta-cinema because, once again, it courageously presents and analyzes its troubled genesis. It starts from the Old Me, before the disease, in order to go through the present one, bald, vulnerable, and strong, and to reach the New Me.
With the same self-irony and the same witty spirit as the previously mentioned film, and alternating between ironic and dramatic moments in an absolutely personal style, Can navigates profound concepts and represents a journey that in the film is compressed in just a few minutes and yet capable of touching on a thousand different aspects: illness, pain, acceptance, the relationship between society and privacy, but above all the relationship between art – almost like a therapy – and life: “Maybe, if I make it into a movie it will feel less real and more poetic… and I could finally share.”
Once again, connection and sharing seem to be the focus of the director, who uses terms usually associated with the superficiality of social media platforms to reveal something much deeper, namely the sincere gift of a testimony of a battle and the battle of many women who cannot use visual art to tell it to the rest of the world.
McGee’s gamble is: “How do I make this into art so that people will see I’m special?” Here, it can be said that she has found a way, and the result is a moving, funny, light, profound, and multifaceted film: “With pain, you make art. And then healing can begin”.
This film is absolutely a must-see, telling so much about society and being human in this contemporary world where we shouldn’t have to fight to gain the right to be ourselves in the truest sense of it, and we should take the word share to a whole, new, meaningful level.
As Kailee did: “I don’t know who the new me is, but I feel ready to share”.
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