Vianne, a feisty, almost seventy-year-old, has received a terminal cancer diagnosis and is determined to die at her home in regional Victoria. Her oldest child Connie, a detached and somewhat hard-headed individual has made the decision to be her mother’s sole, end-of-life carer. The two younger children, Quinn and Amal, both come to keep vigil as Vianne’s passing looms.

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Each child has a different way of grieving – each approach shaped by their individual circumstances and their courage or desire to confront the truth. For Connie, denial and pragmatism allow her to hold grief at arms length. Quinn, a single gay father to Lachie is more of a quiet observer – who possesses an emotional maturity and innate ability to hold space for his mother so she can express her fears, reservations and beliefs. Spirited and passionate Amal, adopted from Sri Lanka as a baby, is the last to arrive at his mother’s bedside. The feelings of abandonment he holds for his birthmother suddenly begin to intermingle with the imminent loss of the woman who brought him up as her own. He desperately tries to reconcile his own sense of cultural identity and his place as a brown man who was raised in a white, Western world.

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As Vianne tackles her impending death with humour and humility, the onus falls on each child to face the inevitable and choose presence and peace, or let this milestone moment pass them by.

The film is broken into 3 parts with the same series of events around Vianne’s passing seen three times over but from a differing point of view, each one through the lens of the children and their contrasting grief journeys. Within these character points of view, different camera and filming techniques captured the essence of each journey. Quinn’s grief is healthy and fully expressed, so a smooth, mercurial, and handheld technique tells his story. For Connie, whose journey is one of absent grief and denial, the creative feel is still and stagnant frames. And for Amal’s complex grief journey, we explore the use of dolly zoom (or the vertigo effect), which gives a sense of the character feeling ungrounded and disconnected.