When Mother Comes Home for Christmas

 

 

 

 

 

WHEN MOTHER COMES HOME FOR CHRISTMAS... is a film about transnational migration, women’s' labour and displaced identities.

Josephine is an illegal migrant worker from Sri Lanka who lives in Greece taking full-time care of little Isadora. Josephine's own children have been left to a less fortunate fate in the home country, bartered between reluctant relatives and orphanages.

Finally Josephine gets her much-awaited work visa, and after an absence of eight years, is able to travel to Sri Lanka to visit her children. The meeting lasts a brief month. The camera travels with Josephine, capturing the complicated feelings of loss and longing, expectation, desire and disappointment that are the inevitable companions to this transitory union.

Production Credits

Researched, Directed and Edited by Nilita Vachani
Produced by Vangelis Kalambakas and Nilita Vachani
Cinematography: Vangelis Kalambakas
Sound: K. Nandha Kumar and Costas Poulantzas
Production Manager: Nilendra Deshapriya
Music - Ross Daly

Company Information

Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (ZDF) - Production Company
Greek Film Centre - Production Company
Filmsixteen - Production Company
16mm, documentary, 109 min, in Sinhala and English with English subtitles.
A FilmSixteen production for ZDF and the Greek Film Centre with a grant from the Hubert Bals Fund. Germany/Greece, 1996

Director's Statement

On the stage of global economies, at no time are the effects of the laws of supply and demand more keenly felt as when the commodity is the human being.

In recent years, overwhelming numbers of women from poor nations like the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Ethiopia, and Mexico are saved from poverty at home by working as housemaids and nannies abroad.

This has created a situation rife with a complex irony. Women's liberation has taken the woman out of the house into the professional sphere. The more privileged amongst us can afford to hire a 'third world' woman to fill the lacuna at home: to care for the children and run the house. But who is there to take care of this woman's children? And what is the likely impact on a nation whose women migrate in droves selling their gender functions to the domestic spheres of others?

My film explores this paradox through the story of a single migrant worker. Josephine Perera, mother of three, has left her children behind in Sri Lanka to earn her living in Athens, Greece. She runs a rich, suburban household to perfection, taking tender care of two-year-old Isadora, whose mother lives and works in Paris.

Josephine has not seen her children in eight years, but she works hard, carefully saving the dollars that will guarantee their future and her own.

This year Josephine will go home for one month to visit her children. Will they find their mother in this woman whom they scarcely know? Will Josephine make a home for them in the single month she has?

In the process of making this film, I embarked on a journey parallel to the one that Josephine herself has been on for the last many years. A journey which because of the complex reality it engages raises more questions than it can answer.

Awards

• Best Documentary, Festival dei Popoli, Florence, 1996.
• Best Documentary, Festival Internazionale Cinema Delle Donne, Torino, 1997.

Reviews

"When Mother Comes Home for Christmas... is the product of extraordinary persistence, empathy and intelligence; it opens up the emotional lives of an entire family and reveals, in heartbreakingly direct fashion, the true meaning of the phrase "global economy.

The most remarkable thing about When Mother Comes Home for Christmas…is perhaps the way Nilita Vachani's camera stays with Josephine for the entire month in Sri Lanka, as if it were a fifth member of the family. I can think of few recent films that have offered such an intimate human drama while at the same time connecting the dots between rich and poor, First World and Third."

Stuart Klawans, The Nation, May 13, 1996.

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"An accomplished documentary with the narrative texture and emotional involvement of a dramatic feature, When Mother Comes Home for Christmas… transforms a story of everyday hardship and sacrifice into a moving example of unsung heroism. Told with warmth, restraint and a genuine feel for the sometimes unfathomable bonds of family, this is ideal material for docufests, and quality foreign-language webs worldwide.

U.S. trained Indian filmmaker Nilita Vachani lays out the details of Josephine's life with patience and matter-of-fact objectivity. While the film could benefit from being slightly shortened, the material's emotional force grows steadily constructing an engrossing portrait of an uncomplaining woman shouldering formidable burdens alone."

David Rooney, Variety, Feb 26-March 3, 1996.

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"The director's skill allows her to select different narrative rhythms, depending on the scenes she documents, while what absolutely distinguishes her work, besides her feminist and humanistic point of view, is the total respect for the people she focuses on."

Eleni Andrikopoulou, Thessaloniki, 1996

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"Cinema-verite in all its magnificence and with deeply touching scenes, which, never for a moment become melodrama. The subject: a housemaid from Sri Lanka, who lives and works in Athens, goes back to her country for Christmas. The camera follows her everywhere, in Athens, in Tinos, in Sri Lanka, and documents her life. A heart-rending film with a nobility of soul."

Jason Triandafyllidis, Adesmeftos Tipos, 1996

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Stuart Klawans, The Nation, May 13, 1996

"I would rather not tell you about Josephine Perera, her story being known to me only through the work of a gifted documentarian, Nilita Vachani. I would prefer that you get the information directly from the film, as soon as pigs learn to fly. The sad truth is When Mother Comes Home for Christmas… failed to win the affections of The New York Times when it was shown, just twice, in the recent New Directors/New Films series at the Museum of Modern Art. Never mind that the picture, made by a sometime associate of Mira Nair, is the product of extraordinary persistence, empathy and intelligence; never mind that it opens up the emotional lives of an entire family and reveals, in heartbreakingly direct fashion, the true meaning of the phrase "global economy". Without a favorable Times review in her pocket, Vachani is unlikely to attract a U.S. distributor for the film. That's why, with apologies, I now describe something you might never see.

When Mother Comes Home for Christmas… opens with a pilgrimage, as round-faced, middle-aged Josephine Perera sails by ferry to a Catholic shrine set amid mountains and deep blue waters. There, after lighting a candle, she consigns her children to the care of a heavenly mother. We soon discover why. While her younger son, still a boy, is growing up in the dank confines of an orphanage in her native Sri Lanka, Josephine works as a domestic servant in Greece, cleaning a splendid modern house and caring for someone else's daughter.

A title card explains that female domestic labour is now Sri Lanka's number one export commodity, having overtaken tea. We get a quick, almost nostalgic view of Sri Lankan women breaking their backs picking leaves. Then, in a sequence of brief scenes, we visit a government center where Sri Lankan women learn to play their new economic roles. Here is an electric machine that cleans floors and carpets; you push it like this. Here is a machine called the microwave, which heats food very quickly; you enter the cooking time with these buttons and then press, "start". Here is a condom: you must use a fresh one every time you have sex and remove it promptly or else the purpose is lost. We are left to imagine why this last course of instruction should be an official part of the job training. It's enough to know that Josephine unlike the great majority of Sri Lankan servants has secured a visa and work permit for the country where she resides. She's got that much of a grip on her rights-enough that she can even risk allowing Nilita Vachani to film her.

"Show your employers that you are working very hard, and they will be very happy" advises the government training center. We see Josephine vigorously scrubbing mirrors and floors in Athens. We also see her employer an itinerant French woman hopping about at an aerobics class, with her exertions and Josephine's crosscut so blatantly that Eisenstein himself might blush. "I need a long rest," Josephine confesses in a voiceover, in a text from one of her letters home. A rest is more than she can hope for. But as we come to learn, the cross-cutting implies more than dialectic of master and servant. It also invites us to consider in what sense Josephine might be like her employer. She, too, can claim a measure of autonomy as a working woman-as we see when Josephine returns to Sri Lanka and her family for the first time in eight years.

The airport in Colombo: Sri Lankan women are returning from their overseas labours, loaded down with goods. One woman carts in a refrigerator with her luggage; Josephine wheels along a washing machine. The sight of it makes sense, somehow. She'd need a box that big to bring eight years' worth of feelings back to her children- a cardboard box, since nothing in their lives is going to be too fancy. Out of Colombo she goes to her sister's place (a pop song on the soundtrack, government-produced, lauds the joys of working abroad as a servant); and there, Josephine proves to be the boss. She has bought a bus for her older son, so he can run his own business. She is going to buy a house. Her daughter wants to marry, having chosen a young man with a perpetual grin and no prospects; Josephine is the one to negotiate the dowry and living arrangements. Her younger son, the one who ordinarily lives in the orphanage, needs straightening out; only Josephine can do it.

What must it be like to cram your whole domestic life into just one month? And what if the need for cramming should demonstrate, in a perverse way, your success? As one of the lucky few who made money abroad and kept her dignity, Josephine gets to distribute the goods, make the decisions and preside over the emotional wreckage. The most remarkable thing about her is that in doing so, she so thoroughly transcends the categories of "victim" and "victor".

The most remarkable thing about When Mother Comes Home for Christmas…is perhaps the way Nilita Vachani's camera stays with Josephine for the entire month in Sri Lanka, as if it were a fifth member of the family. I can think of few recent films that have offered such an intimate human drama while at the same time connecting the dots between rich and poor, First World and Third. Hoop Dreams comes to mind; but that was about a subject more glamorous than floor-scrubbing. No crowds will ever pump their arms for Josephine Perera. Still she's every inch a champion. Watch for screenings at museums and film festivals- and keep an eye out for flying pigs.