For her latest documentary, filmmaker Teenaa Kaur Pasricha turned to a subject intensely close to her: her breast cancer diagnosis and her recovery.
In What If I Tell You, Pasricha explores not only her experience of cancer but also the silence around this particular form of the disease. Pasricha questions the overall reluctance in society to talk about a cancer variant that can transform women in fundamental ways.
“When I was undergoing treatment for breast cancer, I realised that no one wants to talk about it – even my parents said, forget it ever happened, like it was a bad dream,” Pasricha told Scroll. “It’s not an easy thing to forget, and perhaps it’s good to remember the lessons I learnt from the experience.”
Completed in February, the documentary has been doing the rounds of festivals, with an upcoming screening on May 15 at the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Mumbai. “I wasn’t just making a film about myself but multiple films about so many other women too,” Pasricha said. “That’s one way to normalise the experience, rather than consider it as a stigma.”
What If I Tell You includes scenes of the Mumbai-based Pasricha’s visits to her oncologist and conversations with her parents, who live in Ajmer. A friend, Nomi, with whom Pasricha converses through video calls, lends Pasricha an ear and a shoulder.
“Some days are long,” Pasricha says in the documentary. “Those are the days you meet the doctor.”
Pasricha’s previous films include 1984, When the Sun Didn’t Rise (2017), about the women who were affected by the anti-Sikh violence in Delhi following Indira Gandhi’s assassination by her Sikh bodyguards.
In 2018, a week before Pasricha won a National Film Award for 1984, she found out that she had breast cancer. “I had no reference for cancer, except for the film Anand,” Pasricha said. In Hrishikesh Mukherjee Anand (1971), Rajesh Khanna plays a terminally ill cancer patient who refuses to let the disease get the better of him.
“I wondered, will this be my end too, will I die, will I have a life after this?” Pasricha said. “There were so many questions.”
In the documentary, Pasricha pursues various coping mechanisms, including signing up with a theatre group. She had begun seeking a partner even before the diagnosis, she said. An important section of What If I Tell You is dedicated to meeting prospective companions and asking whether they will accept a woman with a cancer diagnosis.
“I felt, let me continue the search, let me see what men think of me,” Pasricha said. “Would they be able to connect with me, appreciate what I have undergone, accept me in a very normal way?”
All the men Pasricha met gave their written consent to being featured in the documentary, she said.
“We have cordial relations with everyone even today,” Pasricha added. “The film hasn’t been edited in a way that favours me – the idea was to make the film balanced and not judge anyone, even though I may disagree with him.”
For Pasricha, the exercise of turning the camera on herself has been revelatory.
“I really got to know what self-love meant,” she said. “I didn’t understand this New Age term before but now I do. In my previous films, I put my work before my self. Somewhere, I have understood the importance of putting myself above my work. I’ve also learnt to slow down in life too.”
