Domestic workers drama in ‘Sunday’ – ‘Parvona’ fosters Indo-Tajik ties

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BUSAN, South Korea, Oct 10, (Agencies): A documentary that takes an intimate look at the daily dramas of foreign domestic workers has premiered at Asia’s largest film festival, with its director pushing a fresh perspective on the millions employed in homes across the globe.

“So much of what we hear and see about them is sensational or negative,” said Baby Ruth Villarama on the sidelines of the 21st Busan International Film Festival in South Korea.

“I wanted to show them living their daily lives, with their own hopes and dreams, and hopefully that will open up a dialogue about who these people are the role they play in the world today,” she said.

Villarama’s quietly engaging “Sunday Beauty Queen” is in the running for the major documentary prize in Busan and follows a group of foreign domestic workers in Hong Kong as they prepare to take part in an annual beauty pageant.

By shadowing their preparations for the event, while also getting a close-up look at their daily work routines and the interaction they have with their employers, the film gives rare voice to the worries the women have over such issues as job security, pay rates and the distance between them and their families back home in the Philippines.

Preparing

“They work six days a week and yet they spend their only day off preparing and training for this annual event — I wanted to know why,” said Villarama.

“The truth is that this event gives them a sense of identity. It’s about this dream to be happy, despite their struggles, and we are all looking for a happy ending in our lives.”

Although exact numbers from individual nations are hard to come by, the International Labor Organization estimates there are around 50 million overseas domestic workers employed globally.

They are a vital part of the Philippine economy, sending an estimated $26 billion home each year — or around 10 percent of the country’s GDP.

Hong Kong employs an estimated 300,000 foreign domestic workers – the majority from the Philippines and Indonesia.

Villarama’s film comes at a time when there is unprecedented attention on their lives — both in that city and beyond — due to a number of high-profile cases of abuse by employers, including one that resulted in a six-year prison sentence.

But the Manila-based director said she was determined to avoid such controversies when charting her documentary’s narrative arc.

“I think audiences are looking more for stories that feed their soul a bit, and the best way to do that is to go into people’s individual stories and try to understand their journeys, rather than simply look for sensations,” said Villarama.

“I think that this is a way we can understand each other more. My own dream is that people everywhere can understand the situation migrant workers everywhere find themselves in, working a long way from home.”

The winner of BIFF’s Wide Angle documentary competition will be announced when the 10-day festival comes to a close on Saturday.

India and Tajikistan do not have many ties by way of film co-production, but Bollywood films dubbed in the Tajik language are immensely popular in Tajikistan. More than 500 are dubbed every year.

A battle sequence in Yash Raj Films’ “The Rising: Ballad of Mangal Pandey” (2005), starring Bollywood icons Aamir Khan and Rani Mukerji and British actor Toby Stephens, was shot at Tajikistan’s Aychi village, close to the Afghanistan border.

In 2013, the Tajikistan foreign minister requested Bollywood filmmakers to shoot films there, positioning it as a cheaper and geographically and culturally closer alternative to Switzerland, and promised to make the process smooth. Nothing has come of that proposal so far.

“Parvona,” a film project at the Busan Film Festival’s Asian Project Market, aims to change this scenario. The film is about a pregnant, young Tajik woman, Parvona, who searches for a family willing to buy her unborn baby. Tajikistan-based filmmaker Sharofat Arabova will direct.

Arabova is an alumnus of Busan’s Asian Film Academy. Her debut feature “Tasfiya” won the Tajik Film Experts and Critics Award at Tajikistan’s Didor International Film Festival in 2014, and has seen considerable festival play. In 2015, she was on the NETPAC juries at the Moscow International Film Festival and Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival.

Equity

Pushpendra Singh is producing via his Indian outfit Marudhar Arts. He has put in the initial equity and is looking to begin raising the rest of the $300,000 budget at Busan. Thereafter the project will apply to European funds and grants.

Singh’s directorial debut “Lajwanti” was a Berlin selection in 2014 and he is in negotiations with Netflix on it. Singh’s directorial venture “Shifting Lines of the Desert” has been awarded the Asian Cinema Fund for documentary from the Busan Film Festival this year.

Singh and Arabova met while studying at the Film and Television Institute of India, in Pune. “When I read the story, to me it was like an Indian story,” says Singh. A woman, whose husband abandons her, she realizes she’s pregnant. What does she do?”

“There is no market for such films in my country,” says Arabova. “There is no industry and distribution for this kind of story. So the release will be in the countries that provide the funding.” Singh adds that with the proliferation of streaming services, the whole world is a market.

Korean independent sales house, M-Line Distribution has picked up international rights to “A Single Rider,” the second Korean-language film produced and presented by Warner Bros.

The debut feature of director Lee Zoo-young, “Single Rider” sees a promising fund manager who gets suspicious of his wife’s adultery and starts watching her from a distance, only to confront a shocking truth that shatters what he has stood for. The drama features Korea’s top actor Lee Byung-hun (“The Magnificent Seven”) as the fund manager and prominent small screen actress Kong Hyoo-jin (“Crush and Blush”) as his wife. Lee was at the Busan Film Festival this week collecting an award and talking about his Hollywood career.

Currently in post-production, the drama is set for a theatrical release in spring, 2017.

M-Line has also picked up director Kim Deok-su’s second feature film, “Park-time Spy.” Also set for an early 2017 release, the action comedy sees a story of a 35-year-old intern at Korea’s National Security Agency who accidently discovers that half million dollars has been scammed from the agency’s account by a phish attack.

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