Overgang

A film made in cooperation with the Amsterdam VIDO group (Vrouwen in de overgang/Women in the Menopause) about several women facing the menopause. The film shows how many of them start a second life in this period.

The film Change of Life is about women between their forties and sixties, women who are in "transition". It is in fact a unique generation who more than any other have experienced the greatest changes in one lifespan. Just think about the bitter poverty of the crisis years, the Second World War, the great explosion of prosperity from the fifties. Women in all these situations were stable factors: perfect housewife and mother.
What now is the matter with this generation? Why are particularly they the ones who daily visit doctors and psychiatrists, and why are they the greatest consumers of tranquillisers? Do they now maybe have to pay the price because they have first and foremost lived for others and in the last place for themselves?
In the form of portraits the film shows personal, actually exemplary living standards of some women now and in the past. The women in the film dismiss the myth that older women are stuck in their ways and cannot change. They can begin anew, have illusions, realise plans, make new friendships just as well as younger women, only with a bit more experience and detachment.