About movie

Promise and Unrest

Original title Promise and Unrest

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Separated from her daughter Gracelle at 7 months, Noemi Barredo left the Philippines for work in Malaysia to support her parents and extended family before arriving in Ireland in 2000. Filmed over a five-year period \’Promise and Unrest\’ is an ethographic portrayal of a Filipino migrant domestic worker performing caregiving and long-distance motherhood, while simultaneously assuming the responsibility of sole provider for her family back in Babatgnon, Leyte Province. Through the camera lens and mother-daughter scripted voice-over narration, the film observes the transnational dimensions of global care work, the everyday intricacies of Noemi and Gracelle’s relationship situated in a wider familial context, together with their reunion in Ireland and the beginnings of a domestic life together in the same country for the first time.

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Author/s Grossman, Alan and O\’Brien, Aine

Alan Grossman is a South African ethnographic filmmaker and Director of the Centre for Transcultural Research and Media Practice (www.ctmp.ie), Dublin Institute of Technology. He has a longstanding production involvement with questions of migration and cultural identity across different transnational contexts. He co-directed \’Silent Song\’ (2000, UK) about an exiled Kurdish musician in Scotland who, in 1976, refused to perform at a Ba’athist Party convention in Baghdad, together with \’Here To Stay\’ (2006, Ireland), an observational film capturing the expression of migrant political agency and new civll society formations in multiracial Ireland. He is co-editor of a combined book/DVD-ROM titled ’Projecting Migration: Transcultural Documentary Practice’ (Wallflower Press, 2007). Áine O’Brien is an Irish academic, filmmaker and Director of the Forum on Migration and Communications (FOMACS, www.fomacs.org).

Research Alan Grossman
Photography Alan Grossman
Sound David McCauley
Editing Simon Hipkins and Ariadna Fatjo-Vilas