First time we see him Keith Vincentduring his documentary “Distraction”, which had its European premiere in Thessaloniki Documentary Film Festival, where he received the Greek Parliament’s Human Values ​​Award, his deep blue eyes staring into the camera. His hair is shaved. The frame is close – you can see his freckles, light eyelashes. Someone puts headphones on him and something that looks like a headset. If it had been any other movie, it could have gone into space. But for the first time, we see Kit Vincent getting ready for another MRI to see if a tumor has grown in his brain.

I first saw Kit Vincent in a house in London in 2016. We ended up dancing to Greek songs on chairs. Over the next few years, he introduced me to the American jazz musician Roy Hargrove, we talked about cinema, journalism and politics, laughed, danced. We were both in our early 20s. But in May 2018, Keith’s life changed.

“I was driving and stopped at a gas station,” he tells K. “I was holding the pump when I suddenly felt completely confused – I did not understand what was in my hand, I could not find words, it seemed to me that something was going completely wrong,” she says. As she was about to call for help, she fainted. When he woke up, he did not know who he was, where he was. It’s harder for him to talk about that first seizure and that terrifying feeling of the unknown than it is about the day he was diagnosed in July 2018.

There was only the doctor, his parents and himself in the room. When they were told that 24-year-old Keith had an incurable brain tumor, his father’s heart stopped. Luckily, the doctors brought him, and Kit’s anxiety, at least for a few hours, shifted to his father. When he was diagnosed, he was not surprised. His suspicions were just confirmed.

In October of that year, he underwent surgery, and until he recovered, he moved to his father’s house. He began thinking about making a film about the medical industry and cancer, but soon decided to focus on his father and how he got through Keith’s condition.

After being diagnosed, Lawrence, a retired college principal, decided to grow cannabis because he had read that it could help Keith deal with his seizures. A lifelong atheist, he delved deeper into Judaism, trying to find the meaning of life, death, whatever. Keith began recording their conversations, and although Lawrence eventually landed The Distraction, over the next four years the documentary evolved into a film about Keith’s mother, his girlfriend, who met a few days after surgery. – and him.

“I don’t want this to be a sad film,” he says shortly before the end of Distraction, which has received support from the British Film Institute and the Sundance Institute, among others. “She shouldn’t be sad. I want to give them something that they can see when I’m not here, something that will remember me,” he emphasizes, “and I want them to know that I was happy.”

“Psychologists don’t understand what I’m experiencing, this existential fear. The film was much more therapeutic than the sessions.”

Keith hasn’t cried since he was diagnosed. He visited various psychologists, but with all of them he comes to the conclusion that they cannot help him. “I know they don’t understand what I’m feeling, this existential fear,” he tells K. The film was much more therapeutic than the sessions. “I felt I was in control, that if I made a film about my condition, I was in control,” she notes. For the first two years after her diagnosis, she practiced yoga endlessly. “Actually, I hate yoga,” he says with a laugh, but then it helped him. He stopped drinking, smoking, eating right. “You lose control of the big things and try to control the little things,” he explains to K.

“What do I want to do before I die? The only thing we leave behind are the good things that we will be remembered for.”

At first he was angry. For a while he could not listen to other people’s problems. “Then I lost some friends, I didn’t have time for what they wanted to discuss, and I wasn’t interested in it – I had to re-learn that other people’s problems are also problems,” he says in “K”.

When he was diagnosed, his attitude towards time changed. “I feel like I can’t make plans. You know, people around me get married, think about children. I don’t feel like I can do it,” he says. Now he lives his life by semesters – from one magnet to another. “The previous month is full of anxiety, the next month, if the news is good, is full of joy.”

Anything more important? “No, not really,” he says. Except one. “You know, when I was 24, I didn’t care about love, it wasn’t a priority. It’s a priority now,” he says, and laughs, saying that sounds awfully salty, even though he insists on his cynicism – he’s British, after all. “I don’t just mean Isobel,” he says of to my girlfriend, I also mean platonic love: love for your family, for your friends, for those who make you feel loved, understand you, support you.” After the diagnosis, he thought about what kind of person he wants to be “What do I want to do before I die? The only thing we leave behind is the good that we will be remembered for,” he says. “The legacy I want to leave is that I was a good person. I don’t care if strangers think I was good, I care to know that I changed my people’s lives.”

He does not feel sorry for himself – “pity is a useless emotion, such things happen in the world, it’s just a pity that this happened to me.” He has not turned to religion and is not interested in the afterlife. “I find much more comfort in life,” she says. He does not consider it a race against time, and his volume is an enemy. “I feel like I’m still me, only with a brain tumor,” she says.

He does not hope for any future cure. “I try not to think about what might happen, it’s a waste of time, I just think about what is happening now, what my life is like now,” she says. Some time ago, he underwent radiation therapy, which improved his seizures. Soon he was due to undergo chemotherapy, but this meant that he would not be able to go to festivals in Missouri or Thessaloniki. “I feel immeasurably better and more optimistic about my life now that I’ve been to festivals, I can tell you that,” he says.

Is he afraid of death? “I am afraid of the process before, not being able to do anything, and my parents or Isobel will be my guardians, I think I would like to be able to control the situation before I get there,” he says, referring to euthanasia. “But I try not to think about it until I have to.”

During interviews and throughout the weekend in Thessaloniki, we laugh. Keith remains a happy person, full of love and joy of life. “It made me want to live longer,” she says of the diagnosis, “but it got harder because I have cramps, hospital visits, medication makes me tired, sometimes it’s hard to even go for a walk. I have learned to appreciate things differently, but the only time I get upset is when I realize that I am different because I can’t do what other people do because I have no energy and I was very energetic. . Human. I caught myself wanting to live the way I used to,” he says. “Perhaps,” he adds, “just growing up.”

I ask him what is the meaning of life. Laughs. “Is there any reason? I don’t know if there is a universal value. For me, the point is to try to be happy in simple ways.”

He quickly indicates that he regrets what he said. “I sound like a cheap self-help book,” he says with a laugh. He notes that he doesn’t have a wish list, a list of things he would like to do before he dies. I tell him that if he did, he would probably make a movie based on it. “Everything I wanted to do seems to be happening anyway! You get paid to make a movie and basically spend time with your family and your girlfriend, and then you get paid to go to international festivals with them,” he says. “If this,” he adds, “isn’t a wishlist experience, then I don’t know what is.”