(June 20, 2013 - Toronto, Ontario) John Board is veteran Canadian 1st AD/associate producer with an impressive resume that dates back to 1970 and Paul Almond’s Act of the Heart. He has worked with David Cronenberg on seven of his films (The Brood, Videodrome, The Dead Zone, The Fly, Dead Ringers, Naked Lunch and M. Butterfly), and his other credits include the Oscar-nominated Atlantic City and the Genie-winning The Grey Fox.

Board is also a passionate advocate of homeopathic medicine, and in 2002 he compiled something call he calls his ‘Hollywood Survival Kit,’ a handy briefcase full of remedies, herbs and ointments, which he claims, enthusiastically and repeatedly, has something to cure anything. In fact, Board is so convinced the first scene in his documentary Me, the Bees and Cancer (which opens tomorrow, June 21 at the Royal in Toronto) is devoted to a rap song that he wrote and performs in front of his house – sort of an advertisement in rap extoling the virtues of his ‘Survival Kit.’

Two-years ago Board was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a fairly common form of cancer resulting in the growth of a tumor in his right armpit. With a grand of seed money from the $1,000 Feature Film Challenge, he sought to document his own cancer alternative – bee sting or venom therapy. The result is an intensely personal and at times hard-to-watch documentary…

References

1. ^{^} Canadian MovieDatabase (www.northernstars.ca)