500 euro. How much is it worth?

I once saw a desperate Asian lady trying to buy some packs of instant noodles by using a 500 euro note at an Asian market in Madrid. She failed. My imagination ran wild: How did she get the banknote that hasn't been issued since 2019? Why did she think an ordinary shop would accept it? Does she manage to spend it eventually?

This prompted me to write a story about an immigrant navigating in a strange, adopted country, especially when Europe’s political climate has become harsher to the foreigners in recent years. I changed the protagonist from an Asian to an Eastern European to better reflect the societal landscape of Leiden, where the film was shot, and to make the story politically more relevant to the Dutch context.

500 Euro is also a wake-up call on what is valuable? A 500 euro note, backed by the ECB, is supposedly valuable. But when no one accepts it, the banknote is just a piece of useless paper. What is valuable is, after all, a collective recognition, without which nothing is valuable. In the age of rampant financial speculations, from real estate to digital currencies, it’s even more urgent to have independent judgements on what is really valuable, instead of blindly following the trends.

Furthermore, 500 Euro demonstrates the irony of our monetary system. We invented cash, payment cards and crypto to make buy and sell more freely. But to protect these systems, we impose rules and regulations that make ourselves never truly free to use our own money. A 500 euro note is unlikely accepted by a shop. A debit card has a daily cash withdrawal limit. A crypto could be so sketchy that no one treats it as a store of value.

Last but not the least, this film couldn't have been made without the collaboration of local shops in Leiden, which have struggled with the decline of its high street. Therefore, I would like to take this short as an opportunity to highlight the issue and encourage people to shop local. Mortar-and-brick stores are the soul of a city. The death of a high street is the death of a city. Money has surely gone virtual over the past decades whereas transactions need not to follow the same direction and thus narrowly benefit the tech giants.

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