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Since its Irish premiere at the 2010 Dublin Jameson International Film Festival, Real To Reel Section, Promise and Unrest (79/94 min) has been selected to screen at the following international film festivals:

Capital Irish Film Festival, Solas Nua, Washington, USA, December, 2011

Jean Rouch International Film Festival, Paris, November, 2011

Athens Ethnographic Film Festival, November, 2011

Taiwan Ethnographic Film Festival, Taipei, October, 2011

Days of Ethnographic Cinema, Russian Research Institute of the Cultural and National Heritage, Moscow, September, 2011

31st International Nordic Anthropological Film Association (NAFA) Film Festival, University of St Andrews, Scotland, August, 2011

Art-Kino Croatia, Rijeka, June, 2011

Women Make Waves, Migration Film Festival, Taipei, Taiwan , May, 2011

ETNOFILm3, Festival Etnografskog Filma, Rovinj, Croatia, April, 2011

‘Days of Ethnographic Film’ Festival, Audio-Visual Laboratory, Institute of Ethnology, Scientific Research Centre of Slovene Academy of Sciences and Arts, Ljubljana, Slovenia, March, 2011

Waterford Film Festival, Ireland, November, 2010

San Diego Asian Film Festival, Jury Competition, USA, October, 2010

16th International Film Festival ETNOFILM ČADCA, Slovakia, Main Section, October, 2010

‘People on the Move: Migration Cinema in Israel and Europe’, Cinemateque, Tel Aviv, Israel, September, 2010

Cambridge Film Festival, September, 2010

DMZ Korean Documentary International Film Festival, Paju City, Korea, International Competition, September, 2010

11th European Association of Social Anthropology (EASA), University of Maynooth, Ireland – ‘Visual Representation of Crisis Through Ethnographic Film’ (in collaboration with CAFFE (Coordination of Anthropological Film Festivals in Europe), August, 2010

Premiere, Jameson Dublin International Film Festival, Official Selection, Reel to Real Section, February, 2010

Reviews

‘A gut-wrenchingly powerful film’ (Cambridge Film Festival, 2010).

‘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.

Promise and Unrest documents five years in the life of Noemi Barredo, a Pilipina migrant who works as an elderly caregiver in Dublin, Ireland. Remaining at home are her two children, Noy-Noy and Gracelle (fondly called Chinggay by her family), who are taken care of by her sister, Neriza.

This growing phenomenon of transnational women has alarmed many scholars and activists; about half of the total population of migrant workers are women. In 2004, sociologists Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild’s Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy argue that because First World women are entering the workforce in increasing numbers but are still expected to take up the bulk of the household’s domestic duties, Third World women are being hired as nannies, maids, and elderly caregivers to pick up the slack. But what of these domestic workers’ own homes? Ehrenreich and Hochschild point out that these workers often do not return home for years and that their own children are often cared for by aging parents or by other relatives. Some nannies admitted to feeling closer to their clients’ children than their own.

Sociologist Rhacel Parrenas’ Servants of Globalization details the devaluation of domestic work, women, and Pilipina/o labor as seen in their low wage, despite how physically and emotionally grueling migrant labor is.

The film brings attention to these issues, albeit subtly. It includes multiple moments where the viewer can see (and feel) the emotional disconnect and heartbreak that this family often faces. Noemi leaves to work abroad for the first time when Chinggay is only 9 months old. When Chinngay is 6, her mother returns home for a visit, only to find that Chinggay doesn’t recognize her.

The dialogue between Noemi and her roommate, another elderly caregiver named Elvie, reveals the physical and emotional toll that their thankless work takes on them. Unlike in a nursing home where several nurses attend to a group of patients, Noemi and Elvie often work 24 hours a day as the sole caregiver of a patient.

Despite this, their work is devalued and often taken for granted. At one point, the Irish government proposes changes to work permits that would put many migrant laborers out of work. I congratulate Promise and Unrest for not victimizing Noemi and her family, but rather showing their agency. Noemi joins other Pilipina/o workers in protests against these work permit changes and attends meetings, speaking out against these changes.

Promise and Unrest is not a dry documentary but an emotional rendering of the phenomenon of transnational women.  As a Pinay, this documentary really hits home and may even bring a tear to your eye. As I watched this film, I thought of my great-uncle who worked for 20 years as a truck driver in Saudi Arabia and never had a chance to visit to the Philippines to see his family before passing away. I thought of my auntie who works as a domestic helper in Hong Kong, leaving behind a one-year-old son in the Philippines. I thought of my mother’s Pilipina friends in Okinawa who were conned by Japanese employers who claimed they were hiring them to work as cultural dancers in Japan, only to be forced to work as strippers and prostitutes. I thought about the time I studied abroad in Rome and met Pilipinas/os living there, who always asked me upon meeting me, “Are you a D.H.?” Being a domestic helper has become so commonplace that it was abbreviated, and it assumed that I knew what the abbreviation stood for.

As of December 2007, there are 8.7 million to 11 million overseas Pilipinas/os worldwide, equivalent of about 11% of the total population in the Philippines. Given these statistics, this film is sure to hit home for many in the Pilipina/o diaspora. (Film Spotlight, Bakitwhy, San Diego Asian Film Festival, 1 October, 2010) (http://www.bakitwhy.com/articles/film-spotlight-promise-and-unrest)

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synopsis

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

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

Through struggle and sacrifice migrant women often stand as sole breadwinners in the transnational family. Separated from her daughter Gracelle at 7 months, Noemi Barredo left the Philippines for work in Malaysia 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 providing for her extended family in the Philippines. Through the camera lens, the film observes the everyday contours of Noemi and Gracelle’s relationship, their subsequent reunion in Ireland through the `right to family reunification‘, and the beginnings of a domestic life together in the same country for the first time. The film’s narrative arc is shaped by the mother-daughter voiceover scripted by Noemi and Gracelle themselves, deliberately staged in two languages: the mother tongue Waray dialect spoken by Noemi in dialogue with an emerging adolescent and accented English – a new and acquired idiom that Gracelle is forced to learn in a new country.

2010, 79 mins

Directors’ Statement

‘It is often migrant women who stand as sole breadwinners 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

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gallery

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Filmmakers

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

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Contact

For more information contact info.fomacs@dit.ie or Ph: +353 (0)1 402 3006