Buoyancy Film Premiere & Book Release
Sunday, November 4
5pm Doors || 6PM Screening, Reading, & Discussion
$10 with option to donate
RSVP
The book: Buoyancy, the memoir
When faced with an aggressive and rare cancer diagnosis, Jeannie Piekos, writer, poet and art activist, found a way to navigate and share her cancer journey through essays and poetry. In Buoyancy, the memoir, she travels from the heart-breaking, life-threatening diagnosis through the treatment protocol with its side-effects and fallout, and onward into a transformed, unrecognizable self that yearns to find self-acceptance and possibly, recovery. Buoyancy provides a lens into a private space that allows the reader to be witness to the loneliness, bittersweet poignancy and universality of disease.
“Finding peace with my situation meant learning to love what felt broken in my life—my heart, my body and the cells that went awry…”
Jeannie Piekos is an award-winning poet and author of the chapbook, Held Up To The Light. She co-founded the Powderhorn Writers Festival, produced WriteOn! Radio and has performed her work on stages throughout Minnesota.
The film: Buoyancy: Living between dualities
Buoyancy is more than a film about cancer, courage and chemotherapy. It’s an intimate portrait of a woman who becomes stricken with a rare diagnosis. Juggling life and death she finds a path to authenticity as surgery, chemo and radiation strip the unessential away.
The vision for Buoyancy was to go behind the veil to share one woman’s very personal, innermost journey exploring life, sexuality, disease, motherhood and mortality. Director, Will Hommeyer uses his camera to witness the passage as she stumbles down the rabbit hole of cancer treatment. The film draws on universal themes of fear, loss and love within Jeannie's experience and allows the audience to see themselves in her place; to walk beside her on her journey.
The music featured in the soundtrack is by local indie hip hop Doomtree artist Cecil Otter. His intense instrumental tracks support and underscore both the tension of the film's narrative and the lyrical poetic quality of the film.
Will Hommeyer is an award-winning filmmaker. His work includes The Pulse, a documentary celebrating the May Day Parade created by In the Heart of the Beast Theatre, and Seeds, Hope & Concrete, a documentary that looks at the remarkable new trends in urban agriculture throughout North America.