RARE ENOUGH
2022 · 11m · USA
Directed by Ryan Lovell
Genres: documentary
Tones: melancholic, tender
DJ Stewart, a Kansas City skate community founder diagnosed with stage IV brain cancer in 2019, fights for his life — and the documentary chronicles his battle against Grade 4 glioblastoma through the lens of a lifelong friend.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Skate community founder with glioblastoma, filmed by his childhood friend at the same skatepark — the proximity claim is the entire case for this existing, and the cancer-doc genre is otherwise saturated. Probably moving, definitely sincere.
Filmmaker and subject growing up at the same skatepark genuinely changes the witness relation, and a glioblastoma diagnosis story benefits from that proximity. The form is familiar; the access is not.
11:45, 51.8K views, 1,029 likes — DJ Stewart documented by his childhood friend from the Kansas City skate scene is access no journalist gets. The filmmaker's-friend witness frame is the load-bearing structural element; the proximity is what makes the cancer doc subgenre actually function here.