How can cinema show social reproduction? Yoon Sung-A’s documentary Overseas (2019), focuses on a training centre for overseas domestic workers in the Philippines. Trainees learn silver service, childcare and cleaning methods. They are also taught ways to suppress homesickness, fend off violence and sexual assault – techniques necessary for surviving life as an Overseas Filipino Worker – ‘OFW’, for short. Much of this experience is gained through role play; the women imagine and remember difficult domestic scenarios in order to practice ways to de-escalate tension and protect themselves. Together the women must learn how best to fulfil their two-year agency contracts, which, they are promised, will ensure overseas work in the future and will enable them to send dollars back home to their overstretched families.
The training centre is set up as a family home that is not a living space. Labels in English – EQUIPMENT DEMO AREA / PRACTICAL WORK AREA – cover the walls, simultaneously functioning as an English guide, the language of international labour, and a visual translation of the home into a site of work, rather than rest or pleasure. The training centre is a theatrical set on which the enactments of domestic work take place. Instructors talk through didactic exemplars – how to deal with an infuriated employer unhappy with a meal or angry at an untidy bathroom – and the trainees practice their responses. The conscious focus of the institution is on the future, to “prepare yourself” for the work to come. But these are both pre and re-enactments: projections about precarious and dangerous futures are mixed with and based on the past experiences of women who have worked overseas before. The episodic structure of the film is used to represent the plurality of perspectives and also reflects the piecemeal nature of the work itself. Interior scenes of the test centre are interspersed with long shots of the building’s facade at all times of day and various weather conditions, emphasising the 24-hour, year-round nature of domestic labour.
Scenes of domestic work are intercut with stories spoken by the trainees. In close-up, alone or in pairs, the camera hones in on the women themselves, the tight focus visually emphasising the intensity of the work and emotional feeling. Overseas opens with a woman cleaning a bathroom. She is framed symmetrically through the door, and the slowly building sound of her crying is an auditory reinforcement of this visual centring. This is continued dialogically: extended fixed shots of different women as they recount their personal histories place the figure so often occluded in the story of the home front and centre. The camera moves from the individual to the group, showing the mutual support and solidarity between the trainees. More darkly, these group shots are interrupted by scenes of solitude that foreshadow the reality of their future isolation. “You’re smiling now,” an instructor comments before reminding them, “If you’re in that situation the smile won’t be there.”
Overseas makes visible the processes of social reproduction. It shows both domestic work as labour and how this labour, once shouldered by women within the family unit, has in wealthy countries been passed to the migrant worker. The narrative of the film – from training scenes to interviews with employers and eventual deployment to overseas positions – shows how the worker is produced and her dual role in the domestic sphere and the international economy. As the women are trained to work they are also working, pre-living a future life. They rise at dawn, scrub floors and sleep on mats whilst they dress mannequins in satin pyjamas who are posed comfortably in bed. Their instruction also takes place in an academic abstract. In a brightly lit classroom scene an instructor with whiteboard and pen takes suggestions from the class of ways to avert sexual assault. Employers – past and future – exist as phantoms and fables within the house, horror stories of abuse at once softened and brought more threateningly close to home through the process of re-enactment by friends within the centre. Women teach each other the tropes and stereotypes common to the industry: the Lecherous Patriarch, the Insecure Housewife. In role play these are sources of dark humour for the women – one sits with a fake moustache, hidden behind a newspaper, silent while her ‘wife’ screams at another trainee, a knowing pastiche of the inert husband. These enactments and the jokes made by the women are underpinned by the politics of class and race, reflecting the inequality between rich employer and migrant worker. But they are also infused with a more complicated echo of colonial structures that infuse and intensify these social and economic relations. One trope mocked by the trainees is the employer – usually based in the Middle East and Hong Kong – insecure about their inability to speak English correctly, who might channel this anger at their more fluent employees.
Such scenes highlight both the double cultural and economic bind these women find themselves in and their knowledge of it, of themselves as the underpaid, exploited centre of multiple intersecting global inequalities. This bind is made concrete via extended shots of bulk-packaged workers’ documents in the record processing centre shown at the film’s end. Here the women become files that belong to the agency, embassy and immigration. But within this comparative framing – the person vs. the paper trail – the trainees’ lived experiences are kept at the forefront. The individual is linked to the structural, but because Overseas is so firmly grounded in the individualities of the trainees it avoids dehumanising the women or reducing them to allegorical examples. In the end, the woman is always at the centre of her own story.
Georgie Carr is a writer based in London.
