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Keep The Change

When Polly finds a coin in her mother’s ashes, she decides to alter her life radically.

synopsis

The sudden death of her mother is a wakeup call for Polly: the time for living is NOW, and not in some far away safe place. She changes her mantra from “better safe than sorry” to “better die of a heart attack than of boredom”. The problem is, fearful Polly has no idea how. The solution is handed to her by her dead mother. When Polly scatters her mom’s ashes, a coin falls out. Polly sees it as a sign from her mom. Flipping a coin is every bit as unpredictable and radical as her mother was. With her mom as a guardian angel she can put in her pocket, she goes on a quest to find the wild spirit within. But a coin’s choices are capricious, to say the least. Polly blows up her marriage and her affair, quits her job, loses friends, sells her house on a whim, even ends up in jail. Meanwhile driving her family to despair with her unpredictability. But from chaos comes wisdom. Polly realises the inner voice that reacts to the coin is her intuition, and it’s time to start trusting that again.

Director’statement

18th April 2013: a mother dies. Abruptly, unexpectedly, and a few decades too soon. No time to say goodbye. Two daughters are left behind with a bunch of unanswered questions and the immediate awareness to live life to the fullest. What if she had gotten unwell at home and not in South Africa? What if we had managed to get to her sooner? What if we hadn’t cancelled our last mother-daughter trip because “we were too busy at work”? What kind of grandmother would she have been? What would we have said to each other if we had been given an extra day, or half an hour? The crippling pain subsides over the years, visions for the future are adjusted. We make plans, trips, poems and new memories without her, but always about and for her. We keep looking for her in birds resting on the windowsill, in signs given by the cosmos and in the eyes of our own daughters. And, of course, also in the series we try to develop. Elke Neuville as writer, Maaike Neuville playing the main character.

TFL PROGRAMME:
SeriesLab Talents 2022
Discover more details here:
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SeriesLab Talents 2022

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