GAYLENE Preston calls her new documentary 'an upfront exploration of the emotional discoveries of women with breast cancer'. Ever alert to the potential of a joke to encapsulate the surprising or inconvenient truth, Preston's effrontery in calling her film Titless Wonders goes hand-in-glove with the painful personal nature of the task she has set herself.

She's seen women in her family die from breast cancer and others survive, and she has spent the last six years watching her friend Shirley Grace overtaken by the disease. The subject of her film is coping with the utterly destabilising nature of life-threatening illness, and she prompts a range of women to tell her just how they have managed - and not managed.

Grace's daughter Aimee reads from her mother's diary, providing the film's one account of the alternative medicine route. Irihapeti Ramsden talks of burying a breast in the garden and throwing a party. One woman was so relieved not t be diagnosed with lung cancer that she thought she got off lightly.

In the case of dancer, Jan Bolwell, trauma and resolution are vividly enacted in her dance piece Off My Chest, which is woven through out the film. Other survival measures are much more prosaic, but all move towards a measure of post-diagnosis identity expressed at his most dramatically assured by Jan Bolwell in the photograph that appears on this page.

Listening to their stories it's impossible not to be struck by how vitally necessary such discourse is for the ill - and how it is denied like a contagion by the well and by the wannabe well. Shirley Grace died a few days into the new millennium, and this film, dedicated to her memory, gives her the support group she never had and the conversations that might have enriched her suffering.

BILL GOSDEN Director, New Zealand Film Festival

New Zealand women say:

"The film was excellent - courageous, empowering , inspiring scary, thought-provoking"

"A deeply moving experience. The ability of all the women to find friendship and address devastating fear and loss with such honesty and humour was inspirational."

"Marvellous! A great mixture of poetry and pragmatism."

" Listening to their stories, it's impossible not to be struck by how vitally necessary such discourse is for theill nad how it is denied like contagion by the well and the wannabe well"
- Bill Gosden, Director NZ International Film Festival