Husband and wife filmmakers Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert tackle the most daunting of subjects in “A Lion in the House” – children with cancer.
Airing on PBS as a four-hour presentation of the documentary series “Independent Lens,” “A Lion in the House” is both excruciating to watch (children in pain, children dying) and ultimately life-affirming.
Bognar and Reichert approached the film after their own teenage daughter successfully went through a year of chemotherapy and radiation after a lymphoma diagnosis.
Reichert called it “a year of hell,” but it also made her feel more alive than ever before.
TV DATEBOOK
“A Lion in the House”
Five families cope with their children's cancer.
9 p.m. tomorrow and Thursday, KPBS/Channel 15;
“You know you are truly alive when you are living among lions.”
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– Isak Dinesen, “Out of Africa” author
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“I, for the first time, understood really deeply what it meant to be a mother,” she said in January at a PBS press conference. “I felt like a mother lion, I felt alive. ... The kids and the parents (in the film) are the lions.”
From that notion came the title of this remarkable and remarkably heartbreaking documentary. Filmed over eight years, “A Lion in the House” shows the toll insidious cancers take not only on their young victims, but also on their parents, siblings and the doctors and compassionate nurses who treat them.
Dr. Robert Arceci, then chief of oncology at Cincinnati's Children's Hospital, approached Bognar and Reichert about making a film about children with cancer. “Our hope was that this wouldn't be an advertisement, but it would be a serious investigation into the lives of very seriously ill children,” Arceci said. “I wanted to have a piece that would be used educationally, not just for families and communities, but for professionals in training, doctors in training, about what we do behind the scenes ... to really gather a transparent view of what I consider a really very important world.”
Five families granted the filmmakers access during their struggles. They were told they could say, “Not today,” if they couldn't stand the presence of cameras during a particularly rough period. Few did.
“It ain't no sense in hiding it,” said Al Fields, 18, one of the patients profiled. He was diagnosed at age 11 with non-Hodgkins lymphoma. “If you hide it, you can't get no help, so why not do it? That's the easy part, being on camera.”
The filmmakers ended up with 525 hours of tape, and their first attempt to piece together a film resulted in an 18-hour movie. Eventually they whittled it down to four hours.
“A Lion in the House” chronicles not only the struggle of the children, but of their parents, too. Some come to regret fighting too hard at the end of their child's life. Sometimes the siblings of dying children gain peace and acceptance sooner than their parents.
Bognar was impressed that families allowed the filmmakers to continue to come into their lives even after their child died.
“They graciously let us stick with them through that,” he said. “And we see very slowly, painfully slowly, how you do that, how you reclaim and restart your life. It's really an act of great generosity on their part.”
Why would anyone choose to watch a TV program that shows children in agony? It's a fair question, and I'm sure most viewers will opt not to put themselves through that. But for those who do, “A Lion in the House” will make you appreciate your own health. It reminds us that many of our daily frustrations are comparatively trivial and petty. It shows us not the slick characters on fictional TV medical dramas, but the important work that's done every day by the flesh-and-blood doctors who attempt to heal.
