Winner of Best UK Film
Q&A with Lawrence Vincent & Kit Vincent
Content Warning – Deals with death
https://youtu.be/3zPsgdLFA8Y
When a young filmmaker is diagnosed with terminal cancer, he enlists his family on an intimate and darkly humorous journey. Employing the likes of Jewish conversion and cannabis farming as well as uncovering shocking family revelations, each help them to come to terms with his illness.
When a doctor first informed Kit Vincent of the presence of a late-stage tumour in his brain, his father promptly fell to the floor and had a heart attack, and his mother began screaming in panic. Recounting this moment of chaotic, life-altering tragedy in his 2023 documentary, Kit laments: ‘why wasn’t I filming that?’*
Originally intended to be a documentary on his father Lawrence – posited by Kit to be an ‘ex-college principle with a PhD by day, and pot-smoking anarchist by night’, the documentary expands its focus to include Kit’s relationships with those around him. Kit’s response to his terminal cancer is to film everything, often to the protests of those on screen.
Red Herring stands as a soulful meditation on life’s palpable transience, and a paean to the joyous and often tumultuous vulnerability of familial love. Overwhelming and nebulous concepts – such as death – are confronted within familiar and prosaic settings; the acceptance of mortality is seated around the dining table.
‘I don’t want it to be a sad film’, Kit ultimately explains: ‘I want to give something to remember me by – and I want them to know that I was happy’.
Bryony Chellew
