Princes In Exile

A gifted, asocial teenager with a brain tumor (Zachary Ansley) spends a summer at a camp for children with cancer and gets his attitudes turned around, in a sensitive, touching, and far from depressing drama from Canada, directed by Giles Walker from a screenplay by Joe Wiesenfeld, adapted from Mark Schreiber’s novel of the same title. The characters (all of them campers and staff members) are realized with a great deal of depth and feeling, and the film never caves in to sentimentality or cliche; the thematic focus is how to deal purposefully and honestly with cancer, but what really commands respect here is the varied group of people we’re introduced to. The cast, uniformly effective, also includes Nicholas Shields, Stacie Mistysyn, Andrea Roth, Gordon Woolvett, Alexander Chapman, and Chuck Shamata. (JR)

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