3 ‘Vital Stories’ Films Had World Premieres At Tribeca Festival

Reconstructing Charlie Sheds Light On A Breast Cancer Diagnosis

Reconstructing Charlie is a dark comedy that followed the titular character getting diagnosed with breast cancer at seemingly the worst time—when she was trying to reconstruct her life after getting divorced. Thus, the word “Reconstructing” ended up having a pair of meanings. Charlie didn’t realize that her post-marriage “glow up” would include radiation treatment.

But here’s the thing. Director and writer Lara Everly, who went through a simultaneous divorce and breast cancer journey herself, was able to make the film very real and quite funny at the same time. So, even though the premise was seemingly dark, the film included lots of light moments. These included Charlie—played by Emily Arlook—trying to go through a “Boob Bucket List” with her sister—played by Brooke Lyons—rather than simply remaining shall we say breastfallen. It essentially showed that health issues—even very serious ones—can be portrayed in a very accurate manner while keeping the viewers very engaged and entertained at the same time.

“What Hollywood often gets wrong about breast cancer and stories of disease in TV and film is it often shows the most high stakes story,” Everly explained to me. “Hollywood loves high stakes but that is not accurate to real life. Not everybody that has cancer is going to die from it.” For example, over 90 percent of women in the U.S. diagnosed with breast cancer are alive five years later. So, Everly wanted to portray a story where despite not all of the boobs making it through, the characters in fact do.

Run It Back Shows The Not So Sweet Challenge Of Navigating Re-Entry With Diabetes

In addition to making it through, Run It Back is about making it out—from prison back to the community after five-years. The short film follows the first 24 hours out for the main character—Victoria “Sweet Tea” played by co-writer Tiffany ‘Tiny’ Cruz. You could say that the adjustment is neither tiny nor sweet. There’s the strict parole officer, her mother mistaken Sweet Tea’s insulin needles for drugs and confiscating them and her spiking blood sugars as a result of diabetes that make the day a very up and down affair in more ways than one. When the film ends, the feeling is that you’d to run it back and see the next day. And the next.

That’s because director and co-writer Abby Pierce and Cruz have made the film feel quite real. At the Tribeca Film Festival, Pierce mentioned how their “inspiration came from teaching incarcerated youth improvisational theater for a while, six-plus years.” Cruz herself had experienced incarceration before. “When I came out and went through reentry, everything was so different,” Cruz recalled. “Navigating love and different things like that.”

Do I Know You From Somewhere? Takes Some Action About Alzheimer’s

Now before I got a chance to see Do I Know You From Somewhere, I didn’t quite know what to expect. Writer Angela Wong Carbone, who also played the main character Kimmy, and director Alan Scott Neal mentioned something about disguises, impersonating strangers’ loved ones, action and suspense. My immediate thought was that’s not what you typically see in a film centered around Alzheimer’s and caretaking for such a diagnosis.

Indeed, the film turned out to be far from typical—in a good way. It began with Kimmy—a struggling actor—appearing in disguise, concealing her identity, as part of a gig to make more money to defray the costs of her mother’s Alzheimer’s care. The gig though starts to get dangerous in itself. So before you know it, there’s the intrigue, action and suspense that Wong Carbone and Neal spoke of along with the very real challenges of Alzheimer’s.

“I think it’s really important for us to show hope beyond the diagnosis, because so many of these characters on TV, historically don’t have speaking lines.” Wong Carbone told me, “They’re just there as window dressing.”

She went on to say, “I think that with people living with Alzheimer’s and their caretakers, there is a full spectrum of human emotion and experience. There’s laughter, there’s joy, there’s sadness, there’s bittersweet, there’s everything in between,” she emphasized. “From the moment that someone receives that diagnosis, it does not necessarily mean that everything is over, right? We wanted to show that there’s so much still to hope for, and there’s so much still that can be accomplished.”

The film also drew from Wong Carbone’s own experience with her great aunt who “lived with my family when I was in high school. We had noticed that she was having some cognitive decline, typical symptoms of Alzheimer’s, or dementia. It took quite a bit of convincing to get her to come live with us as she was a very strong willed woman, an incredible person who had an amazing career in a time when women did not lead companies and things like that.”

‘Vital Stories’ Emerged After A Study Found Many Inaccuracies In Hollywood TV And Movies

Through all three films, I never felt like I was watching some kind of instructional film. While these three were very different from one another, each gripped you in a different way. You kept wondering what would happen next with Kimmy’s disguises, Sweet Tea’s re-entry and Charlie’s Boob Bucket List. All three provided more working evidence—with an emphasis on the word working—that you can make entertaining films while being scientifically accurate.

Yet, for whatever reason, Hollywood as Everly lamented continues to churn out TV shows and movies that include very inaccurate portrayals of different people and their health. I’ve written in Forbes about how the representations of women and various racial and ethnic minorities like Asian Americans in Hollywood productions frequently don’t match those of real life. And until you have a TV show or movie showing a doctor filling out forms and other paperwork for hours on end, you are not going to get an accurate view of what really happens in healthcare.

The experiences of patients and their caretakers are often way off as well. It’s not just the obvious superficial stuff like people looking like they are coming out of a hair salon right after they gave birth, went through an operation or dealt with a medical emergency. In fact, research led by Stacy L. Smith, PhD, an associate professor of communication and founder of the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative at USC, and supported by Lilly, found the inaccuracies to be pervasive and striking. These study results prompted Smith, Katherine Pieper, PhD, and W. Michael Sayers to create and release an Advancing Health Storylines in Popular Entertainment toolkit in 2025 to guide filmmakers.

Tribeca and Lilly employed this toolkit when they formed and conducted the Vital Stories program. This program began with 19 selected film teams convening an inaugural Creative Summit hosted by Tribeca Studios. Lina Polimeni, senior vice president and chief marketing officer at Eli Lilly and Company, described to me the subsequent selection process, which included various advisors and an expert jury: “You really had a lot of different perspective in the jury that I think got us to a really good place. So you said like, ‘Could you build a world around this character? Can you imagine the entire milieu around the character?” Eventually, the three aforementioned projects earned developmental funding and production support, culminating in their world premieres at Tribeca.

So that’s how people got to laugh with a breast cancer diagnosis, combine some Sweet Tea with diabetes and experience action with Alzheimer’s care. This storied beginning to the Vital Stories program is further evidence that much more accurate and authentic health storytelling should be vital parts of filmmaking going forward.