Remittance, the movie that won a Brooklyn Film Festival certificate of outstanding achievement for its Filipina lead actress, real-life domestic helper Angela Barotia, will be shown in Metro Manila by the end of this month.
Read: Pinay domestic helper wins acting award in US
The film, co-directed by Americans Patrick Daly and Joel Fendelman, is about the sometimes sordid reality that confronts migrant workers in Singapore where some women are forced, by circumstance, to take on extra work to earn more money to send back home.
It is the story of Marie (Barotia), who is betrayed by her husband while she is working as a domestic worker in Singapore.
“As she gets caught up in the new life she is building for herself, she needs to choose between her personal aspirations and her family responsibilities,” acording to the plot summary.
Barotia, from the Albay-Bicol region, moved to Singapore in 2009. “Before that she was a vegetable seller.
She moved to support her husband and two daughters.
Many employers wouldn’t have allowed her to take part in the film but her Singapore employer backed her, even taking on a new worker for three months to allow her time to shoot,” reports Rob O’Brien.
Shot mostly in Singapore, with some scenes in the Philippines, Remittance has been accepted at the World Premieres Film Festival Philippines that kicks off on Jun 29.
“This will be our first official screening in the Philippines,” Daly told Coconuts Manila. “Our two main priorities for distribution are to make the film widely available to migrant work communities (not just Filipinos) around the world, and to show in the Philippines,” he added.
According to Daly, whose own mother worked as a domestic worker when she moved from Scotland to the United States in 1966, one of the reasons they made the film was to give Overseas Filipino Workers in Singapore a voice, so their friends and relatives back home to grasp the realities of being an OFW.
While there were three professional actors in the movie, the rest were real-life domestic workers who sacrificed their days off to participate in the film. Over 400 OFWs appear in Remittance either as actors or extras.
“After Daly and Fendelman found their cast they spent months doing rehearsals to customise the script and dialogue with the women, working in their native Tagalog dialect, to ensure the film felt comfortable for them,” according to O’Brien.
“The end product includes stories of working life in Singapore — having salaries doctored, being forced by an employer to cut their hair short or taking on extra jobs to pay off agent fees — all of which came from the cast’s own experiences.”
Daly told O’Brien: “There is nothing in this film that hadn’t happened to one of the girls. It is not directly their life story, but everything we included was told to us by the women who took part. We wanted the women to act as little as possible.”
“It was a special project to have been involved in, and both cast and crew were really motivated as both artists and activists to get the film made,” Daly told Coconuts Manila.
“The OFWs in the film really loved seeing themselves on screen. I think, for many, even those who played small roles, it has been an empowering thing.”
Despite it being, for all intents and purposes, a Singapore film, the movie was not accepted to the Singapore International Film Festival when Daly submitted it in 2015.
There was no reason for the rejection, and Daly and his co-producer were surprised and disappointed.
“Because Joel and I are not Singaporean (though I have been a resident for 10 years), I think we fall into an awkward category. Also, big film festivals are highly competitive, and the programmers have a very difficult job of building a good program.”
The good news is that Remittance will have a theatrical run in the Lion City towards the end of 2016.
So far, the film has been shown at informal screenings for educational purposes. A few months ago, an NGO in Singapore that deals with domestic workers screened it. “The reaction was fantastic — women laughing, crying, etcetera. It was clearly an emotional experience to both see a story that they can personally relate to, and to see OFWs on the screen as ‘movie stars’,” recounted Daly.
“We are a very indie production, and it is hard to line up distributors. Our plan has been to send the film around the international film festival circuit this year to raise awareness, perhaps get a few awards and accolades, and drum up some press or interest in both the film and the human interest of the story of the women who star in the film,” he said.
“We are hoping that our screening in the Philippines, along with some good press, will get some distributors there interested in working with us to get the film out there.”
Remittance will be shown at Cinematheque Centre Manila on Jul 2 (1pm), Jul 6 (7pm) and Jul 7 (1pm).
The screening is part of World Premieres Film Festival 2016, which runs from Jun 29 to Jul 10, 2016, in various cinemas across Metro Manila. Check the schedule here.
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