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.
Though The Kris Hallenga Story is ostensibly based around a cancer diagnosis, the film is more generally about Kris’s life, which was bigger than that. She grew up in Germany with her twin sister, whom she obviously adored. She liked running around the garden and making dens. She was articulate, imaginative, fun to be around. She was directionless as a young adult, as we all are, but breast cancer awareness became something she was passionate about. “Cancer gave me a life I never could have imagined,” she says early on in the documentary. She was fearless in a way that seems completely contagious, even through a screen. In 2009, she won a Pride of Britain award for her charity work. “You can’t say no to Kris,” says Fearne Cotton, who ran a half marathon for CoppaFeel! and became her friend straight away. “I loved her from the minute I met her.”
The film doesn’t always make for easy viewing. You watch as she’s diagnosed with multiple brain tumours and then as her cancer progresses. But there are also moments in which she is alarmingly animated: projecting “1 in 3 are diagnosed. #RETHINKCANCER” on to the side of the Houses of Parliament like it’s a heist movie, or being there for the birth of Maren’s son, Herbie. Which is life, isn’t it? There are hideous moments and there are beautiful moments, and some lives end up being a lot shorter than others. By 2017, she had stepped down as the CEO of CoppaFeel! to focus on herself and how she wanted to spend her time. “When I held Herbie,” says Kris, “he confirmed something very reassuring that I sort of already knew: that life goes on.”
It’s astonishing that Kris was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer in 2013 and went on to live a full and remarkable life for another decade or so. And it’s also astonishing – and funny, and fun – that she decided to throw her own funeral, so she could be alive to attend it. Which we see at the start and towards the end: Kris with her head painted a dramatic, sparkling silver, while Dawn French delivers a eulogy to a packed-out church. “Right now I am really happy, and I feel such heart-bursting love,” she says at her own funeral. “Life can be so good. But I think mine has been especially good because I’ve had Maren by my side since we met in the womb. When you have a Maren, you never feel true loneliness. How lucky am I?”
Kris died earlier this year, and her sister and friends sprinkled her ashes all over the waves on a sunny day. She also managed to save a lot of lives. In the film, you see her receiving reams of letters from young women in their 20s and beyond who were diagnosed with breast cancer early enough to receive treatment after being aware of the signs and symptoms, thanks to the charity Kris launched.
“The thing about death is it’s, well, so terribly final,” says Kris, addressing the crowd at her own funeral. “Whereas life, well, life is full of opportunities. So let’s seize these opportunities. Let’s live fully, love deeply and make today count.”
Living Every Second: The Kris Hallenga Story aired on BBC Two and is on iPlayer now