Next week starts the annual pinkification of cancer—breast cancer awareness month.  Now I don’t want to take anything away from any woman who is figuring out a way to fight and survive this horrible scourge, but don’t you think that this whole happy pink cancer world has just gone too far?  Talk to any woman who actually has had breast cancer and you will learn very quickly that this is nothing pretty or pink about it.

That’s what the new documentary Pink Ribbons, Inc. which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival shows us.  It digs in to how breast cancer has been corporatized and made to look prettier than the devastating disease it is.  One person in the film calls the way we deal with breast cancer the “tyranny of cheerfulness.”  The film shows women fighting the disease who are in stage 4 and who feel that this way of dealing with breast cancer has made their fight invisible.