New Films! New Films!
Premiering two films from "Serving Cunt" my multimedia exhibition...
Special delivery! It’s been A MINUTE. I’m happy you’re here and grateful to you for being a reader of this substack. Alright! here. we. go. Jumping right in.
On March 13, 2024 I was diagnosed with bladder cancer.
Today, March 13, 2025 *cancer free* I’m releasing the films I made for my first exhibition, SERVING CUNT // THE CANCER CHRONICLES, which opened in July 2024 at SADE Gallery in Los, Angeles 🤍 as a way to process the diagnosis, treatment, and healing.
You can see more about the multimedia exhibition HERE.
It included photography, installations, writing, and the two films below…
I know this is bizarre and cancer is scary but it changed my life. First when I was 16 and lost my dad to the disease and I ran from it. And now, for a second time, when it visited me, and I had to trust myself to go through it and LIVE LIVE LIVE.
BCG GIRL (2025)
A film by Jessie Barr
Directed, filmed, and edited by Jessie Barr
Additional editing by Alec Styborski
BCG Girl is a documentary short film that offers an intimate and visceral exploration of immunotherapy treatment through the lens of personal experience. The film focuses on the Bacillus Calmette-Guerin (BCG) treatment—a tuberculosis vaccine repurposed as a form of bladder cancer immunotherapy—administered in six weekly rounds.
Through stark, observational detail, the film immerses the audience in the raw physical and emotional reality of the procedure: a catheter-delivered dose of BCG, the challenge of holding it in for two hours, the ritualistic rotations on the hospital bed every fifteen minutes (the exact length of the film) to ensure full coverage of the bladder lining. These details, clinical yet deeply human, highlight the endurance required in the face of medical intervention.
By centering bodily experience and quiet resilience, BCG Girl sheds light on the intersection of medicine, vulnerability, and the unspoken rituals of survival. It’s an unflinching, poetic meditation on the body’s relationship to disease, treatment, and the act of waiting—both for relief and for the unknown.
WAITING ROOM (2025)
Directed by Jessie Barr
Edited and sound designed by Rhea Bozzacchi
Footage sourced from Mary Poppins (1964) + Tombstone Territory (1957)
Sound Recordings by Jessie Barr on location in Kyoto, Japan (Fushimi Inari Taisha) + Ojai, CA
"Waiting Room" is an experimental film directed by Jessie Barr that weaves together a hypnotic interplay of found footage and original soundscapes. Edited and sound designed by Rhea Bozzacchi, the film repurposes imagery from Mary Poppins (1964) and Tombstone Territory (1957) which played in Barr’s hospital waiting rooms during cancer treatment, reframing them in a new, evocative context. These disparate visual sources—one a whimsical, fantastical musical, the other a stark Western television series—are juxtaposed in a way that explores gender, nostalgia, and temporality.
The film's auditory landscape, crafted from field recordings captured by Barr in Kyoto’s Fushimi Inari Taisha shrine and the natural surroundings of Ojai, California, acts as both a guide and disruptor, recontextualizing the images and creating a liminal space between past and present, fiction and reality. The sound design blurs the line between the sacred and the mundane, evoking a sense of waiting—not just in a physical space, but in a psychological and existential sense.
Through its fragmented yet immersive structure, Waiting Room invites viewers to sit in the space between expectation and arrival, exploring how time, memory, and media intersect in our collective consciousness.
To anyone struggling with their health, health care, a recent diagnosis, treatment, or chronic pain — you’re not alone.
Thank you to the many friends, colleagues, and strangers who’ve shared their stories of scary health diagnoses, treatments, and healing. So many devastating, wild, moving, and inspiring stories it’s a wonder we can hold them all.
I think if I’ve learned anything it’s that we don’t have to carry them alone.
Please reach out so that others can help.
xo
J