“Cash for Gold tells a heartfelt story of hope and redemption in the face of overwhelming misfortune, and in the process redefines how to convincingly and maturely deploy Christmastime as a thematic conceit. Wrestling with the trauma of losing her husband to heroin and struggling with sobriety herself, Grace (Deborah Puette) lives in poverty with her adorable son Noah, barely making ends meet in a blue collar town devastated by the opioid epidemic.
The script builds the world of rural America with a vivid and efficient attention to detail—shuttered homes, dilapidated trailer parks, rundown karaoke joints—that effortlessly sets the stakes for its characters by virtue of the environment itself: in a town this troubled, every day is a struggle. In her unlikely friendship with Ehsan (Navid Negahban) and his father Mohammad—an Iranian family depicted with respectful cultural specificity—Grace finds the strength and compassion to pull herself out of despondency. In the process, the story conveys how the resilience of the human spirit can overcome even the darkest of circumstances: a truer and more poignant Christmas fable than any in recent memory.”
—The Black List
