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Death Doula

Unable to build relationships with the living, a death doula feels safe with the dying and falls in love with her patient right at the start of her career.

synopsis

Anne begins her training in an old mansion converted into a hospice in the Turku archipelago, the Isle of Death. Her enthusiasm exhausts the nurses, and Anne is relegated to the dirty work: washing floors and, if she is lucky, corpses. One day, Anne is assigned to her first patient, a child whose parents refuse to tell her that she’s dying. Anne’s past, in the form of her sister, begins to haunt her and sends her a client, a grumpy sculptor with brain cancer. It soon becomes clear they have a lot in common, and here it comes – the irresistible connection. Fighting her feelings for the sculptor, Anne pushes herself to the limit of workaholism, helping through the veil a wine merchant, a lonely mother and a beloved pet, among others. Each episode of Death Doula is dedicated to a particular patient, who Anne accompanies to their deaths. With each patient, Anne must acquire and develop different skills in order to help the dying people make sense of their lives before the end.

Director’statement

The outcome of every single life and every single story is predictable - it ends. Even The Archers on BBC Radio 4 will end one day. The well-known resurrected, Jesus, Osiris and others, didn’t hang around the mortal world for too long and were elevated to Heaven. No wonder - if you have an upgrade to eternal divine conditions, why would you stay in this world full of pain, tragedy, expensive booze, complicated love affairs and one single unchangeable condition: nothing and no one who comes into our lives has a guarantee to last? That’s the path we dare to traverse with Death Doula. No, not the path of the gods, but us, ordinary people, who dare to search for what gives meaning to our temporary existence: and when we touch on meaning, we touch on beauty and joy, and all that goodness. Especially when things are sometimes magnified by a fatal diagnosis for ourselves or, even worse, for our beloved, and death is already on its way to our place in Uber...or Bolt. Since they don’t allow scythes on public transport.

TFL PROGRAMME:
SeriesLab 2024

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