A 70-minute documentary about breast cancer, entitled `How Can we Love You?', which has received rave reviews in Canada, will be shown at the Bermuda Underwater Exploration Institute later this month.

Award winning producer and director of the film, Laura Sky, will also be in Bermuda for the free showing on April 24 (7 p.m.) and will be taking questions during the question and answer period at the end of the film.

Local cancer support group, PALS, will sponsor the showing of the documentary, which has been shown in some 44 locations throughout Canada since its launch in January of last year.

Seating at the BUEI is limited to 150 and free tickets will be available from PALS office on 21 Point Finger Road, Paget (236-7357. Admission is by free ticket only!

"Eighty tickets have already been given out and we are asking people who are not going to use them to please return them," said PALS president Ann Smith Gordon.

Only one showing is planned, but depending on the response she says there is also a possibility the film could be shown on local television.

"Few people in Bermuda have not been touched by cancer in some way," said Ms. Smith Gordon.

She stated that 135 persons were referred to PALS last year, suffering from various types of cancers and in different stages of illness. PALS nurses made 6,846 visits to patients last year with each of the five nurses making between five and eight home visits a day to care for more than 100 patients. In just one month last year there were 15 new patients admitted.

"The film will help in understanding many issues related to cancer and/or other life threatening diseases and is designed to assist and inform not only patients and their families and friends but also clinical practitioners, cancer care professionals and health care educators in order to improve patient care," said Ms. Smith Gordon.

A table will be set up at the BUEI for those attending the film interested in ordering a copy of the film.

The documentary is a moving, thoughtful and even sometimes amusing film that gives the audience a candid look behind the scenes at real life situations that could apply to any cancer patient, their families and friends as they live with the disease.

`How Can We Love You?' was launched in Toronto in January, 2001, and went on a highly successful spring tour, making stops in Saskatoon, Winnipeg, Windsor, Thunder Bay, Orillia, Halifax, Moncton, Sydney and Stephenville, Newfoundland.

The documentary offers audiences a candid behind-the-scenes look at Mary Sue Douglas and Jan Livingston, two cast members in the breast cancer play `Handle with Care?', from which the film developed. Both women are dealing with breast cancer themselves.

The film explores the personal experiences of Mary Sue and Jan as they perform their stage roles, deal with the treatment of their cancers and live their everyday lives. They talk frankly about their own feelings of mortality and about their joy and fulfilment in making a difference for other women in the same situation.

The making of `How Can We Love You?' was funded by the Ontario Women's Health Council, through the Ministry of Health and Long-term Care. More than 70 other individual and corporate donors helped finance the production, including the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation, Ontario Chapter.

Award winning producer-director Laura Sky has been making documentaries about comtemporary social issues and teaching university film courses for almost three decades. She established her independent non-profit documentary organisation, Sky Works Charitable Foundation in 1983. Her most recent credits include `My Son the Tattoo Artist' and Working Like Crazy, a portrait of six psychiatric survivors involved in a survivor-run business venture, which aired on educational networks across Canada.

What makes Handle With Care unique is it used real research as its script and real women struggling with metastatic breast cancer as its actors.

The producer says that working on the documentary has changed the way she sees people with serious illnesses.

"I learned that some of my worst fears weren't really as horrible as I had feared," she told a Canadian reporter.

"These are people who still have life experiences that are pleasurable, who are living their lives with cancer as a chronic condition - that is something I had never considered before."

Mary Sue Douglas, an advocate for women with breast cancer, lives with her husband Peter in Toronto and has three adult sons.

"I love it when people say... whether they have metastatic disease or something else, that our play made them feel not so alone...that it validated what they were feeling," she says of her feelings about reading out to audiences.

Jan Livingston, a single, working mother who taught for 25 years at an Orillia community college, became very ill during the production of the film and died before the documentary was finished. She was an educator and advocate for women with breast cancer.

`How Can We Love You?' is dedicated to her memory.