Written by: Lukas Harnisch-Weidauer
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In Catherine Argyrople’s “Growing Pains,” a scene set on a sunny day at a high school pool party becomes a way to explore how pediatric cancer can affect teenagers in survivorship. The protagonist, a curly-haired highschooler named Zoe wears a bikini for the first time in her life, revealing a scar on her stomach.
A school mate asks her where it’s from, but when he learns it’s because of a cancer diagnosis, he doesn’t know what to say, and Zoe rushes home, embarrassed and hurt.
It’s one of many moments in the coming-of-age film inspired by Argyrople’s own experiences with cancer and survivorship. “So many people don’t know how to react when they face a traumatic illness,” she explains. “And especially when they’re kids who can easily misunderstand things and can also be really mean.”
Over twenty years before she began writing the movie, Argyrople was diagnosed with neuroblastoma at Boston Children’s Hospital and began treatment at the Jimmy Fund Clinic. She doesn’t have many memories from that time. “It was a traumatic illness,” she says. “I blocked a lot of it out.”
The memories that remain are the positive ones: a sundae cart that came by daily, playing with the child life specialist and visits from family.
“Dana-Farber does so much for the patients, especially kids, to make them feel like they’re not in a hospital,” she says.
By the time she was five, Argyrople was in remission, but the disease continued to shape her life as she grew up. “It has been the source of a lot of my mental and emotional struggles in my teen years,” she explains. As a child, everyone seemed to know that she once had cancer and she became the target of bullies. Other kids made her uncomfortable when they would ask to touch her surgery scar or ask her about where it was from.
Like Zoe from Agryrople’s movie, the scar became a source of insecurity and harmed her self-confidence. Upon entering high school, she began to believe she needed to lose weight despite being perfectly healthy. She threw herself into volleyball and began obsessively counting and restricting her calories.
Zoe embodies these struggles in “Growing Pains,” as she navigates her first year of high school, the end of a friendship, and training for the crew team. By focusing on the challenges that come well after treatment, Argyrople hopes to present an image of cancer mostly absent from Hollywood where movies about cancer deal with the hospital experience or of people dying from the disease.
The idea for the plot — the story of two friends drifting apart set in the suburbs of Boston — was conceived by Argyrople in her final year at Northeastern University and co-written with Mariana Fabian, a student at North Carolina State at the time. Argyrople connected with Fabian — whose life inspired the film’s second protagonist and Zoe’s best friend, Nat — through an article that Fabian had written about the teen drama “The Wilds.”
“I was looking for a co-writer and it was just a sign,” Argyrople recalls. She cold-emailed Nat and the two hit it off immediately.
Hours away from each other they collaborated on the script, crafting a story that investigated identity, sexuality, friendship, and survivorship. Completing a feature-length screenplay is a feat in itself, but Argyrople’s ambitions extended beyond that. She wanted to make the movie a reality. According to Argyrople, even her mentor at Northeastern doubted if that was a good idea.
But Argyrople pressed on. First, funding had to be secured. She turned to her community for help, and through a crowdfunding campaign along with grants from Massachusetts, she raised a workable budget. Then came casting, which proved challenging. Argyrople wanted her actors to be reflective of the setting of the movie, locals who were a similar age to the characters of the script.
The result was a diverse group of teenagers from the area who faced similar challenges to the ones presented in the script. Molly Mornewock, who plays Zoe, was a miracle find. Not only was she from the area, but she also bore the same scar as Zoe and rowed on a team in Wayland. They are experiences that Argyrople feels strengthened her performance.
The actual shoot took place over several long weeks in greater Boston area towns like Wellesley, Natick, and Marblehead among others. It wasn’t easy. At 24, Argyrople was directing a team of 110 people. And watching personal moments come to life brought up a lot of emotion. “It was just very vulnerable,” she recalls. But with the help of a close-knit team, “Growing Pains,” was completed and premiered at the Boston International Film Festival in April 2024.
For Argyrople, who recently moved to California to pursue her filmmaking career, it was a homecoming, and she arranged for a second screening for friends, family, and the community at the Somerville Theater. It was a fitting setting to see the movie which had been such a community endeavor from its fundraising, to the cast, and the setting.
These days in Los Angeles, Argyrople is an avid surfer, her scar on full display. It doesn’t bother her when she’s asked about it.
“In making the movie, I was transforming a lot of pain and childhood trauma, into art,” she says. “And I think that’s a beautiful way to heal.”
Growing Pains | Official Trailer | Argyrople Productions from Catherine Argyrople on Vimeo.
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- Source: https://blog.dana-farber.org/insight/2024/05/survivor-tells-her-story-through-film/