Storyteller Mark Patinkin becomes the story in new documentary. Here's what that felt like

When Dante Bellini Jr. invited me to lunch at Federal Hill's Aurora Club in 2019, I assumed it was just social. I knew him as a longtime communications guy with RDW Group.

But soon after we sat down, it was clear he had something on his mind.

He told me he’d recently taken a leap, moving from the security of a corporate job in his early 60s to a new venture, making documentaries.

At the time, he was already working on a few, including an impressive “get” – a biopic on Ken Burns, the legendary filmmaker who agreed, for Dante, to sit on the other side of the camera after years of resisting requests.

Now, there in the Aurora Club, Dante proposed a movie about me – specifically, the kidney cancer journey I was in the midst of then, and I suppose always will be, the disease being like that.

I’d recently written a series about it in The Journal, which got Dante wanting to tell the story onscreen.

I was flattered, but nervous.

Film is an unblinking medium. It can lay a person bare. It did in my case – literally, in a few scenes – as his cameras filmed me shirtless looking at the surgical scars.

So I had to trust Dante.

I’m glad I did.

The highest compliment for me as a writer is when someone says a story captured them in a way they hadn’t fully seen until they read about themselves.

Dante did that with me in film.

But the movie’s about far more than myself – he interviewed my doctors and caregivers as well as my family. In a telling compliment, my kids told me they didn’t fully realize what I went through until they saw Dante's movie. Nor did I realize what they'd endured.

That’s one of the truths of a grave illness – both patient and loved ones try to protect each other, so they never fully share their fears. But we often share such things with an interviewer – if they’re good.

Dante was good.

One of the main figures in the movie is Dr. Dragan Golijanin, a master who did a complicated kidney-sparing operation when many patients with such a diagnosis have the whole organ removed. At the critical moment, he zeroed in on the tumor with a robotic scalpel and told his team, “Let’s get the damn thing out.”

He’s a larger-than-life guy, and the source of the movie’s title: “Demons & Dragans.”

I’ve watched it a few times now, and it still gets to me when my kids tell the camera things they weren’t able to say directly to me.

Writers often think we’d be good at filmmaking, as do many folks in this time when it seems everyone is editing their own video for social media.

But the first time I saw Dante’s movie, I thought, there's no way I could have achieved anything with such impressive production values. It’s not just the storytelling – it’s his director’s instinct to make each scene visually compelling.

Like the time he suddenly called me and his camera crew to rush out in a pouring rain to capture a similar moment in the storyline.

The film has so far been aired in just a few screenings and festivals. To Dante’s credit, it was one of 200 or so picked out of 7,000 applicants for the Flickers Rhode Island International Film Festival earlier this month, and in a telling achievement, Dante got first prize in the New England Director’s Award category.

I know that touched him deeply – the kind of thing that keeps him going as he works on four or five future films, and still feels that this second career is a leap, but one he's called to do.

You're invited: A screening for ProJo readers of documentary on Patinkin's cancer journey

On Thursday, Aug. 24, at 7 p.m., The Journal is sponsoring a screening of "Demons & Dragans" at the La Salle Academy Arts Center.

We’d love to have you there, and there'll be a Q&A with Dante and me afterward. It’s free to subscribers, and if you can make it, RSVP at tinyurl.com/2mzcscp4 to lock in a seat.

Dante and his camera crew shot an astonishing 45 hours of video for the film. Somehow, he got it down to 26 minutes. That meant spending many hundreds of hours editing. That part’s not glamorous, but, as with most art, that’s what it takes – the discipline of working alone in a room, day after day after day, shaping the final product.

If you do it right, you capture a part of life, sometimes in a way that even the film’s subjects hadn’t seen clearly.

Which is what Dante Bellini did in “Demons & Dragans.”

And why I, for one, have no doubt he made the right mid-life leap.

mpatinki@providencejournal.com

This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: Mark Patinkin tells how it felt to be focus of cancer documentary