An Australian short film about euthanasia is a hit.

Amour, a film about assisted suicide, won an Academy Award as the Best Foreign Film in 2012. It was beautifully acted, quite melodramatic, and a poignant advertisement for euthanasia. Other directors, however, have taken a more down-to-earth view of how euthanasia might operate. This Australian black comedy, The Mother Situation (click to see film*) won first prize in Tropfest, the world’s largest short film festival, a couple of weeks ago.

“House prices are at a constant level of chatter in Sydney and so is suicide,” said the director, Matt Day. “I heard someone talk about this out one night saying: ‘Well he’s going to be fine when his parents die because he’s got the house at Balmain and the place on Pearl Beach’. And all that stuff just kind of congealed and came together and made me laugh… so I thought ‘I’ll write it and I’ll make it’.” 

Nonetheless, Day insists the film is not opposed to aid in dying. “One of the actors did say to me ‘I love this, it’s hilarious but let me ask you, is this anti-euthanasia’ and I said: ‘no it’s not'”. 

* “The Mother Situation” has not been posted to YouTube yet. 

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Michael Cook

Michael Cook edits BioEdge, a bioethics newsletter, and MercatorNet, an on-line magazine whose focus is human dignity. He writes from Sydney, Australia.

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