Written, directed, and produced by Chithra Jeyaram, Foreign Puzzle is an emotional film exploring the story of one woman’s fight with breast cancer. While undergoing cancer treatment, Sharon Marroquin worries about maintaining her livelihood and health insurance as a bilingual elementary school teacher, her challenge of raising her son as a divorced mom, and handling the overwhelming fear of uncertainty for a healthy future. Sharon undergoes a mastectomy, talks with her doctor about reconstruction, and has to deal with an emergency blood clot in her neck. Mostly, Sharon worries about leaving her son alone in the world.
In addition to being a teacher, Sharon is a modern dancer and choreographer and decides to express her feelings about what she is experiencing on a very personal level through movement. Sharon creates a dance performance she names the Materiality of Impermanence and includes her eleven-year old dance student and other female cancer survivors in the various dances. The dance routines reveal the stark reality of having to undergo surgery; Sharon shaves her head for her routine, uses a suitcase in one dance to show the baggage she is carrying, and lays with shards of broken glass on herself to reflect her shattered body in another dance. Coming together, all of the women dance with colorful brassieres symbolizing the commonality of dealing with breast cancer.
Fittingly named, Foreign Puzzle provides a realistic look at the emotional ups and downs of dealing with breast cancer, the uncomfortable cancer treatments, the loss of part of oneself, and the uncertainty for a normal future. Through Sharon Marroquin’s eloquent dance interpretation, this film vividly illustrates dance can serve as therapy for fear and aloneness in the fight against cancer. Recommended. Aud: H, C, P.