jonnas body please hold

At age 19 Jonna Tamases is a student and aspiring stage performer. She has oversized breasts that she wants to reduce. During her checkup with the doctor for a breast reduction she discovers she has cancer.

In Canada, an estimated 22,700 women in Canada will be diagnosed with breast cancer. That is 437 women diagnosed every week. One in nine Canadian women will develop breast cancer in their lifetime. One-third of these women will die.

Jonna Tamases’ experience with cancer was presented on the big screen in her film Jonna’s Body, Please Hold. It was showcased at the second annual BreastFest in Toronto.

When Tamases was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease at age 19, she recalls, “I was pretty angry…I couldn’t conceive what it meant to be facing death.” The next year, she found out she had large cell lymphoma. “Luckily in my case, the chemotherapy worked and the cancer died before I did,” she said.

During her battle with cancer, she didn’t have enough physical strength to go to school or perform on stage. “It’s so easy to feel reduced to be just a cancer patient that you lose sense of all that you are,” said Tamases. “But it’s not all that we are. We’re so much bigger than our tumors.”

Twelve years later, she found out she had breast cancer. “I suspect it was due to the radiation that I had in the area to treat the first cancer,” she said. Often secondary cancers appear in areas that were previously radiated.

She opted for double mastectomy instead of chemotherapy. “Chemotherapy was really hard for me, it was very intense and I was not looking forward to having to go through that again,” said Tamases. She also didn’t like the idea of waiting and seeing, and wanted to move on with her life.

“I thought, I had twelve good years with my perfect little breasts and if I have to say goodbye to them that’s alright for me,” said Tamases. “Luckily I had a very loving husband, who assured me that my boobs were not the reason he married me and so we sort of faced it together.”

Tamases’ story and others are featured as part of Breastfest—the world’s first film festival dedicated to breast cancer awareness. It took place in November at Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum.  Breastfest explores the spectrum of issues surrounding breast cancer through films, panels, workshops and speakers.

The festival raised awareness and aimed to educate people who have not experienced breast cancer. This year’s theme was storytelling. “For the people who have experienced [breast cancer] when they see the stories up on the big screen, they’re able to sort of validate their own story and understand they’re not alone,” said Alison Gordon, BreastFest Film Festival’s director and a vice-president at Rethink Breast Cancer. Rethink Breast Cancer is an organization that helps young people who are concerned about and affected by breast cancer. Proceeds from this year’s BreastFest go towards Rethink Breast Cancer and next year’s festival.

The mission of BreastFest is to open dialogue and to share stories together in a creative way, “Through all the different facets of how different people approach it creatively,” explained Tamases.

Tamases’ idea of turning her own experience into a film, Jonna’s Body, Please Hold, began in 1994. It started out as a script for a one-woman show. Her first version was completely comedic, until a director forced her to write about the darker aspects. “Oh boy, did I fight that tooth and nail because I was so afraid of being too serious,” said Tamases. But she was happy with her final product. “There are comedic moments, and there are serious moments – Really a roller coaster ride, which is kind of what life is like,” she said.

Jonna’s Body, Please Hold is based on her theatrical version. “It was always a dream to take that same and story and fully realize it on screen so that we could create the visuals that I had always imagined with it.”

Jonna’s Body, Please Hold is a bizarre journey in her body. Pearl is Jonna’s internal receptionist that fields calls from each of her body parts. Each body part is a character. “It had occurred to me that there had been so many side effects, that all my different body parts had a slightly different experience of having cancer,” said Tamases. For instance, her upper back loved it. “If you ask my upper back what it thought of chemo, it would be like oh it’s awesome, we can have more!” said Tamases. “If you ask my mouth, I’d be like I’d rather die than have to eat a bowl of apple sauce.”

Jonna’s Body, Please Hold has been praised by critics and has won numerous awards such as the award for Best Cinematography in the 2009 Show Off Your Shorts Film Fest. “People tell me that the humour makes the story less fearsome and more accessible,” said Tamases. “I really wanted to make the movie entertaining so people would want to watch it and not go: ‘oh it’s a cancer movie.’”  Tamases hopes the people watching the movie lighten up. “I want people to leave with a feeling of lightness and joy … How neat it is to be together in this life on this planet,” she said.  http://www.jonnasbodymovie.com/

A surreal film about battling breast cancer
February 3, 2010
Ryerson Free Press
Tracy Chen