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Feminist Filmmaker Explores A Global Dilemma Of Domesticity In Award-Winning Documentary To Screen May 15 At UC San Diego

Feminist documentary filmmaker Nilita Vachani will present a screening of her award-winning film, When Mother Comes Home for Christmas, at 6:30 p.m. May 15 in the Price Center Theatre at the University of California, San Diego. A discussion with the filmmaker and a reception will follow the screening. The event is free and open to the public.

The Indian filmmaker, trained in the United States, comes to UCSD as a Regents’ Lecturer sponsored by the Critical Gender Studies Program. According to program director Rosemary George, “Vachani’s documentary compels us to pay due attention to what is usually obscured by the aura of wholesomeness around the idea of home and domesticity.”

When Mother Comes Home for Christmas documents experiences of a migrant Sri Lankan woman, Josephine, a widow and mother of three, who travels to Athens where she earns money taking care of a Greek child. While she sends practically every penny of her $500 monthly wages back to take care of her own children, they grow up, grow apart and grow dysfunctional without their own mother. This dilemma is made abundantly clear in Josephine’s Christmas visit with her children in Sri Lanka after eight years of separation.

“While Josephine’s labor in Athens keeps one domestic space functioning smoothly and allows a working mother (her employer) to fulfill her ambitions,” George says, “Josephine’s family life is in shambles.” Her children look upon her as “a distant entity who pays the bills.” This, George points out, sheds light on “the human costs and consequences of the global labor arrangements that ease the burden of homemaking in the west … and the full implication of the kinds of displacements that are routine in the current international flow of labor.”

When Mother Comes Home for Christmas was selected Best Documentary at the Festival dei Popoli, Florence, 1996, and at Festival Internazionale Cinema Delle Donne, Torino, 1997.

The Nation’s Stuart Klawans describes this film as “the product of extraordinary persistence, empathy and intelligence … it opens up the emotional lives of an entire family and reveals, in heartbreakingly direct fashion, the true meaning of the phrase ‘global economy.’”

Klawans adds, “The most remarkable thing about When Mother Comes Home for Christmas is the way Nilita Vachani’s camera stays with Josephine for the entire month in Sri Lanka, as if it were a fifth member of the family. I can think of few films that have offered such an intimate human drama while at the same time connecting the dots between rich and poor.”

At a screening/discussion in Philadelphia, Vachani reported that while filming in Sri Lanka, she and her crew were given almost unlimited access. “I thought Josephine would want to be alone with her children,” said Vachani, “but I was mistaken. She wanted us to document her life … to let them (her family) know that she did not have an easy time in her life in Greece.”

The film also was screened at the Museum of Modern Art, the Asian American International Film Festival, the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival, as well as festivals in Rotterdam, Toronto, London, Hawaii, San Francisco, Hong Kong, Bermuda, and Thessaloniki.

Among Vachani’s other award-winning documentary films, for which she is director, producer and editor, are Diamonds in a Vegetable Market, 1992, and Eyes of Stone, 1990.

Vachani received a bachelor’s degree from Indraprastha College, University of Delhi, India, a master of arts from the Annenberg School for Communications at the University of Pennsylvania at Philadelphia, and a master of fine arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In addition to filmmaking she has taught editing, theory and production of a documentary and has given presentations and lectures at numerous universities.

In reviewing When Mother Comes Home for Christmas for India Today, Vikram Goyal writes: “If her (Vachani’s) documentaries are anything to go by, audiences can look forward to many more powerful and thought-provoking journeys seen through the eyes of the filmmaker.”