Head
of the Jury Anna Van der Wee on A Working Mom:
‘A
working Mom’ tells the story of Marisa Villozial and
her return to Bolivia after 15 years of grueling work as a
cleaning woman in Tel Aviv.
It is one mother heartbreaking story leaving behind her 2
infant children, to work day and night, to send back her
pay in the hope to give her children a better life only to
find out that she may have lost them in the
process.
It is also the
story of the hundreds of thousands who leave their family
and country behind in the hope to give them a better life.
It is a universal story of poverty in a globalised world,
of alienation both at home and abroad.
The way the
filmmakers have chosen to tell this story is very
respectful and therefore so effective. We are a fly on the
wall when Marisa comes home. We follow her, we register
what she sees and how she reacts. And how her family
reacts. We hear what is often not said and throughout those
silences a very moving story develops.
15 years of
absence have created hopes and false expectations on both
sides. The contradictions between Marisa and her family
unravel in front of our eyes. They have become total
strangers to each other. They are locked up in
incomprehension and alienation.
When
Marisa wonders if it was worth it to have left her family
behind for money, we are smashed in the face with this most
essential of all questions in today’s world: what is
the real value of money.
