Since its Irish premiere at the Dublin Jameson International Film Festival, Real To Reel Section (19 February), Promise and Unrest (2010, 94 min) has been selected to screen at the following international film festivals:

DMZ DOCS (International Competition), Paju City, Korea, 9-13 September.

San Diego Asian Film Festival (Jury Competition), USA, 21-28 October.

16th International Film Festival ETNOFILM ČADCA 2010, Slovakia (Main Competition), September 29 – 2 October.

‘There is something quite special about the mother-daughter relationship at the emotional core of this visually impressive film … you see people grow up, grow old, a character dies … there’s a poetry to it’ (Luke McManus, RTÉ Radio 1 review of Jameson Dublin International Film Festival, Arena Arts and Culture programme).

Promise and Unrest is a thought-provoking film with strong and striking images … the filmmakers have captured the human complexities of migration and I can understand why many migrants would say ‘that’s my story.’ (John MacMahon, Educational Programmes RTE)

Listen here to review of film on Arena Arts programme, RTÉ Radio One, 17 February 2010.

A documentary film by Alan Grossman and Áine O’Brien, narrated by mother and daughter, Noemi and Gracelle Barredo.

Promise and Unrest unravels a subtle migration story of maternal sacrifice, loss and love.

Separated from her daughter Gracelle at 7 months, Noemi Barredo left the Philippines for work in Malaysia to support her parents and extended family before arriving in Ireland in 2000. Filmed over a five-year period Promise and Unrest is an intimate portrayal of a migrant woman performing caregiving and long-distance motherhood, while assuming the responsibility of sole provider for her family back in the Philippines. Dublin may be a long way from Noemi’s hometown of Babatngon, yet she retains a sharp eye on the welfare of her family, attentive to a range of small businesses she has financed, paying for the education of her daughter and son, medication for her terminally ill father and her sister’s nursing degree. Through the camera lens, home video footage and mother-daughter voice-over narration, the film captures the material and emotional dimensions of global care work, the transnational reach of Noemi and Gracelle’s relationship situated in a wider familial context, together with their reunion in Ireland and the beginnings of a domestic life together in the same country for the first time.

2010, 95 mins

Directors’ Statement

‘It is often migrant women who stand as sole bread winners in the family through struggle, sacrifice and patience’. Noemi Barredo’s comment, delivered in reaction to seeing herself on screen, served as a powerful reminder of why in 2005 we set out to make a film portraying the migratory journey, of a single Filipino mother and caregiver, away from her two young children in search of work, initially in Malaysia and then Ireland, that would ‘lift the family out of poverty’.

We wanted to portray the transnational dynamics of long-distance motherhood and the emotional effects of separation from a daughter aged 7 months, together with the burden of responsibility of labouring to provide food, healthcare and education for an extended family in the town of Babatgnon, Philippines. In the act of migration much like translation, as Salman Rushdie reminds us, something is always lost, yet critically, something is also gained.

The value of Promise and Unrest lies for us most effectively in this in-between space of loss and gain; the negotiation of the ‘here’ and ‘there’ for extraordinary migrant women like Noemi, whose agency in the film is openly expressed less through speaking to camera and more through purposeful actions and long-term planning, strategically designed to culminate in transforming the quality of life for individual family members back home.

During different stages in the film’s production, whether in her cramped Dublin bedsit where she lives with Elvi, a fellow caregiver, or in the Barredo family home, we encountered reluctance on the part of Noemi to divulge her thoughts and feelings. This at times questioned our directorial judgement of Noemi as a vocally ‘strong enough’ character implicated in the ‘global care chain’ – a series of ‘personal links across the globe based on the paid or unpaid work of caring’. As filmmakers we were therefore challenged to relinquish our investment in the power of words as testimony to Noemi’s inner world, yielding instead to a cinematic appreciation of how her deeds and gestures powerfully translated into expanding financial outcomes and deepening emotional attachments, in particular to her daughter Gracelle with whom she was reunited in Ireland in 2007, resulting in the beginnings of a domestic life together in the same country for the first time.

The richness of the film’s narrative arc is enhanced by the mother-daughter scripted voice-over narration deliberately staged in two languages: the mother tongue Waray dialect spoken by Noemi, which assumes an epistolary form, in dialogue with an emerging adolescent and accented English – a new and acquired idiom that Gracelle is forced to learn in a new country, yet which is significantly inflected with traces of her own cultural background. Neither had read each other’s script in advance and it was only when they viewed the film together, did they learn what the other thought and experienced in both the distant past and immediate present. However difficult the film process was at times, especially since we did not have access to the intimate grammar spoken between mother and daughter, we believe that the making of the film – covering a five-year period during which time we lived with the Barredo family in 2005 and 2007 – has contributed in its own way to the flowering of Noemi and Gracelle’s relationship.

Alan Grossman and Áine O’Brien, March 2010

Noemi and Gracelle Barredo


Noemi, Gracelle and Neriza Barredo


Quirino Barredo


Gracelle Barredo


New and old Barredo family home


Rizal Avenue, Babatgnon


Rizal Avenue, dusk


Noemi and Gracelle Barredo, Dublin


Gracelle Barredo, Noemi Barredo and Gráinne Humphreys (Festival Director)
at Q&A session, following screening at Jameson Dublin International Film Festival. (Photo: Patrick Redmond).


Promise and Unrest production team
From L-R: Alan Grossman, Ariadna Fatjo-Vilas, Aodán Ó Coileáin, David McAulay, Áine O'Brien, Simon Hipkins.

Directed by: Alan Grossman and Áine O’Brien
Produced by: Alan Grossman and Áine O’Brien (FOMACS), in association
with Ned Kelly Pictures
Edited by: Simon Hipkins and Ariadna Fatjo-Vilas
Music and Sound Design by: David McAulay
Production Manager: Aodán Ó Coileáin

For more information contact info@promiseandunrest.com or Ph: +353 (0)1 402 3006