This story begins with running.

On September 20, 2015, I was supposed to run the Moscow Marathon. But instead of running 42 kilometers through the streets of Moscow, I received ten hours of surgery to remove a tumor in my intestine and six months of chemotherapy. Oncology changed a lot not only my life but also the life of my family.

This is a project I started working on in 2018, and over the past few years, despite the COVID pandemic and border closures, and the war in Ukraine: I actively filmed in the United States, Russia, Ukraine and Montenegro. Hours of interviews, terabytes of video, a dozen international flights, thousands of kilometers by car — all this ended up in one film! But "Within the Family" is more than just a documentary. It is a concentrated emotions, experiences and memories. They will make you angry and smile, cry and be amazed, shock and delight, but in any case, do not leave indifferent.

Cancer affects all aspects of a person's life, and therefore cannot help but affect the relationship within the family. The course of the disease, the various symptoms, and the various treatments are perceived differently by the patient and those around him or her. Making a diagnosis is the most stressful experience. The vagueness of the causes, the possibility of a lethal outcome, the complexity of treatment, and the impact of the news of the illness on interpersonal relationships with others — all these have a profound effect on the patient's condition. In this situation, relatives and friends can be a resource for a full recovery, or they can be an additional stress factor, worsening the emotional state of the patient and, as a result, reducing the chances of recovery.

The main purpose of our film will be to study the peculiarities of intrafamily relationships of oncology patients. The film would be interesting for families who facing cancer or can be used by specialists of helping professions (psychologists, social workers, medical personnel) of oncology centers while carrying out educational and correctional work with oncology patients and their families.

In the documentary we would like to examine two main aspects of the cancer experience:

Family

One of the basic assumptions that we work under is based on a statement made by a family therapist who writes considerably about families and illness. He says that cancer or illness is like an uninvited guest, an intruder, who comes into the family, and has to be somehow incorporated into the family. Different families may incorporate the illness or draw a boundary around it differently. Some families may invite illness and allow it to run wild and consume family life. In other families, illness becomes a part of the family but is put on a shelf at times, or even gets its own room. So illness is kind of like an uninvited guest, but the way that the family incorporates illness can vary by family.

Within this shared family experience are different stories cut from the same reality. We want to put together these different perspectives and understand them.


Religion and Spirituality

A life-threatening disease such as cancer makes us confront realities and questions that cause us to step back from our lives and reflect on the meaning and implications of the illness.

Our perspective on these realities and questions emerges in large measure from our religious, spiritual, or philosophical viewpoints. These, in turn, influence how we experience the illness — its meaning, how we feel about it, and how well we come to terms with it. A religious viewpoint can help us as we grapple with these issues and seek to keep our bearings through the mental and emotional turmoil that comes with having cancer.