Prognosis: Notes on Living

Florida Premiere

In perhaps her bravest act as a filmmaker, Academy Award-winning documentarian and LGBTQ+ activist Debra Chasnoff responded to her diagnosis of stage-4 cancer by turning the camera on herself, her wife, and her sons to chronicle the journey that lay ahead of them. With customary candor and humor, she took on the assignment out of necessity: not wishing to be defined only as patient or victim, she adopted a role she could play with certainty — that of the storyteller. What emerges is a raw, intimate portrait of shifting relationships and identities, a story about hanging onto the people you love, as you prepare to let them go. Completed according to her wishes by a circle of Bay Area peers and family, Prognosis: Notes on Living is not only a film about illness. Clear-eyed and unsentimental, intimate and honest, it is the unforgettable, present-tense diary of a life fiercely lived, and a love worth fighting for.

Accompanying the film premiere is a panel discussion with co-director Kate Stilley Steiner, producer/wife of Debra Chasnoff, Nancy Otto; and producers Joan Lefkowitz, Lidia Szajko, and Andra Oshinsky, as well as moderator Rabbi Fred Klein, executive vice president of the Rabbinical Association of Greater Miami. To view the conversation please click here.