Cinema history is crammed with legendary stories of directors fighting at death’s door to finish their films, like Kubrick with Eyes Wide Shut and Huston on The Dead, with these background details adding urgency to what we eventually see. For his debut feature-length documentary, Red Herring, Kit Vincent, a young Brit in his mid-twenties, has bravely put himself, and his immediate family and loved ones, in the eye of his own self-shooting camera, having learnt in 2019 that he’s developed a fatal brain tumour. What results is destabilising, disarming and touching, a film with little precedent in the annals of cinema, with this process of the self-chronicling of death often the preserve of literature, or personal essays in a journalistic mode.

Following its world premiere at True/False in the USA, it went on to Thessaloniki (garnering the Human Values Award) and Docaviv, before enjoying its UK premiere and keeping up its strong audience response at Sheffield DocFest last week.

Introducing his film in voice-over, which then drops in only sporadically throughout the running time, Vincent wonders aloud about the overall scope, purpose and structure of the film to come; what registers securely is his fatalistic sense of humour – “I’m the grim reaper,” he says plainly, with the handheld camera rig trained on his bathroom-mirror reflection – and that his work is intended to be an outlet to process the awful circumstances. Critically, this extends to his phlegmatic live-in partner Isobel, his free-spirited father Lawrence and his mother Julie, who incidentally works as a hospital nurse and whom he has a historically frostier relationship with, with Lawrence primarily raising him throughout his teenage years.

The film’s dramatic progression is thus outsourced to his parents, as Kit happily assumes the role of observer, as opposed to mere participant – indeed, the prognosis and uncertainty of his eventual lifespan seem to have intensified his obvious goal to be a feature filmmaker. Intriguingly enough, we’re not given an exhaustive picture of all of their lives; we leave the film with many questions and gaps, in spite of certain prominent details. Much screen time is given to Lawrence’s displaced grief and attendant, eclectic interests: first, the comic discovery of a hydroponic marijuana farm, which gives apparent relief to Kit’s condition (“What are you doing?” he laughs; “you’re going to get us arrested!”); and second, his quixotic conversion from staunch atheist to a full embrace of practising Judaism. Sudden cuts of Lawrence wearing a skullcap, mouthing the Hebrew blessings and musing on the Torah (the Jewish holy book) as a rich work of “philosophy”, rather than religious instruction, are played as near-sight gags, and the absence of connecting sequences or more detailed rationale is surely felt.

The Julie sequences, often taking place sparely in her kitchen (although Kit skilfully introduces her through an evocative montage of her coop full of hens), have a piercing intimacy; she often directly refers to the film, as it’s being shot, as she mulls over her son’s questions, but this never feels overly uncertain, or amateurish owing to it being left in the edit. A stunning personal revelation she voices late in the film, stemming from her background as an adopted child, is a coup for Kit’s risky, chosen approach, and a testament to how filmmaking has helped him endure and live fully in the present moment. And as audiences, it’s a very humbling and human privilege to be witnessing this, by his side.

Red Herring is a UK production staged by Good Kid Films, with support from Postcode Films, Bright West Entertainment and Bungalow Town. Its world sales are handled by Cinephil.