Living Every Second: The Kris Hallenga Story review – an astonishing tale of hope

From attending her own Dawn French-hosted funeral to saving women’s lives, the inspirational cancer campaigner’s incredible life is movingly captured in this documentary

A terminal cancer diagnosis isn’t usually something that makes anyone feel hopeful. TV portrayals, fictional and otherwise, tend to depict the disease as tragic and cataclysmic (which, of course, it can be), with the patient relegated to bed to “battle” the disease from the off. But Kris Hallenga – the focus of the BBC documentary Living Every Second: The Kris Hallenga Story, who was diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer at just 23 years old – didn’t want her story to unfurl like that. Instead, she decided, she would live harder, fuller and with even more purpose. “She was oozing with life and ideas and she was desperate to make big shit happen,” her twin sister Maren tells the camera. “Wanting to get every ounce out of this life was a way of controlling this disease.”

For Hallenga, that sense of purpose came in the form of telling as many young people as possible to check their breasts – a widespread campaign that would turn into the still-active charity organisation CoppaFeel!. Women in the UK don’t get invited to breast screenings until the age of 50 (when they’re most at risk), though of course, breast cancer can strike at any age. Hallenga wanted to make sure other young people knew this. She wanted to save lives. But also, she wanted to make even talking about cancer less scary. So in 2013, she made a film for the BBC about living with breast cancer, Kris: Dying to Live. And then, in the decade that followed, invited the cameras back in again and again. This film, from the director Neil Bonner, is the result of that footage.

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