CANCER

By Victoria Midoni
TREATMENT October 2019

Logline: Jasmine Mood watches her father’s battle and eventual death to cancer while
she deals with Eastern Europe’s corrupt medical system.

 
OVERVIEW:

“If anyone strikes my heart, it does not break, but it bursts and the flame coming out of
it becomes a torch on my path.”- Hazrat Inaya.

Jasmine Mood is a tall blond girl in her teen age that loses her father that suffers and
fights with Eastern Europe medical system.
Her father suffers of cancer and her mother struggles to save him. The doctors in
Eastern Europe do not inform the family properly because they think is not necessary
since the man is not an authority or celebrity or other important person in their society.
The family are treated unrespectful by doctors and the real diagnosis is hidden.

Tonally, the film should be a collision of different genres -- action, drama, even social
(suburban) satire. The world of the Mood’s is slightly hyperreal, mischievous, and
always dangerous.
 
CHARACTER SET-UP:

Jasmine Mood plays a big role in the reconciliation of the characters toward the end of
the play.
 
On the other hand, minor characters are less important like her sister and her brother
whose role is only to come and visit their father. We meet our main characters Jasmine
Mood and John, her father with her mother Mary that is taking care of her husband.
John’s father of Jasmine is in the hospital for about two months where fighting with his
disease and doctors. But we see they need to be here little conflicts roiling under the
surface between medical system and the disease.

Eastern Europe in 2000’s.

They’re essentially told that the cancer disease is not to advance and there are many
ways to treat it. But they are living a massive lie, because Medical system is
concentrated on business. 

They are the middle-class family. John was working all his life for the government. And
Mary, Jasmine’s mother is managing their farm and lands. Jasmine’s brother is studying
abroad, and her sister Jenifer married and moved to her husband house where he owned
lands and a huge farm. The relation between her brother and sister is cold. Now, after
two months of their father being in the hospital, they figure out to go abroad and ask
other doctors for new radiology and a right diagnose.
STORY:

The plot starts with an information that was told to Jasmine mother when the doctors
checked her husband health situation. However, the real diagnose is hidden because it is
considered that this person that suffers of cancer is not very important for the society.

It’s the Mood house. They’re sitting down to dinner together. The atmosphere is very
sad and depressing. The Mood family every dinner for about two weeks have the same
mood.

We see: Jasmine’s room is actually a meat-packing plant in little village. And she’s
more alive here -- in her element. Her mother Mary told her that her father is very sick
and that the doctor they found abroad, informed them to go home and be with John
because there is no treat. The cancer is metastasis and it is all over inside the body. And
now Jasmine took action to fight with medical system corruption.

The Moods struggle at first, still not working as a team. Jasmine sister and brother give
up.
She had arrived at the house that Tuesday evening, the day he died. When her mother’s
call reached her, the panic only mildly tempered in her voice, all she said was, “It’s
really bad.” Her mother managed to contact the priest in time to deliver the last rites.
Jasmine stood by the end of his bed, head bowed, reciting the prayers with the rest of
them. Her dad lay there, cross-eyed and still from the morphine. He was
uncharacteristically quiet.
It startles her that actually watched him take his last breath. Fitting she suppose because
he watched her take first. He made her and now she would carry his DNA to the end of
her life, a strange sort of passing of the baton. These past several months she spent
many hours massaging his feet, he liked that, and she had noticed the similarity. When
they carried his body out a few hours later and his feet poked through the end of the
bag. The odd things that made her feel a part of him, here was another to add to the
absurdity of death. And dying. How it all began.
Jasmine father and she were always friends. His illness had been with him for long time
but the real end, the sharp decline, was in the last two. It was during that time when
their relationship empowered.
When someone is very sick, their loved ones actually get sick, too. The sickness is one
of worry, concern, and the whittling away of energy. One has to be optimism.