Separation, performance and the determination of the migrant worker in Sung-A Yoon’s documentaries
Overseas, 2019, dir. Sung-A Yoon, courtesy of the artist.
Words by Thea Sun, interview by Dalia Al-Dujaili.
“They're all stereotyped as being naturally made to be good nannies”, Sung-A Yoon claims of the motivations behind her most recent film Overseas. The stylised documentary focuses on OFW, Overseas Filipino Workers, maids who leave their homelands, severing ties with their own families to go and look after another family, sometimes for many years.
As an Asian woman herself living in France, Sung-A finds a kinship between the damaging stereotypes put on the Filipino women and her own struggles through facing discrimination and prejudice. Insidious stereotypes towards Asian women include exoticism, obedient, weak and docile. Aiming to shed light on the mental fortitude and selflessness to rewrite the negative narrative surrounding migrant work, especially for women, Sung-A Yoon’s film is testimony to the strength and uniqueness of its characters. “I wanted to refute the stereotyped and essentialised depiction of the migrant domestic worker as an uneducated, weak-willed and passive victim. Making this film this way, was to me a way to state something important, to fight against racial, gender, class based discrimination.” With the opening shot framing a woman cleaning a toilet, quietly sobbing as she powers on with her task, Sung uses intimacy to confront the viewers with the harsh reality these women put up with to earn more money than they can ever hope to make back home in the Philippines.
Episodically structured Sung-A’s careful planning results in a plurality of perspectives and shows the range of work undertaken by these women. Training includes learning domestic housework to dealing with abusive employers. A core part of OFW training uses role-play to teach the workers how to remain submissive to deal with verbal or physical abuse whilst showing little to no emotion. They are proudly told to never let them see you cry. “I saw the emotion on her face, facing a difficult reenacted situation and I thought, wow, this is where the truth is,” Sung-A says in response to a role-play exercise, “It's hard, the scene was full of fear and hope because she's acting. But they're in the moment when they know that they will soon leave and face this.” The training reenactment scenes between experienced and first time workers drive home the potential danger these women face in order to earn a living.
In Sung-A’s recent work, performance is key. Full of Missing Links also plays on an unusual form of reenactment, a scene in a police station where a female officer willingly participates in helping find Sung-A’s father exclaiming a “reunion would be good for the film”. Sung-A says, “I didn’t want to make a film that was purely personal,” yet Full of Missing Links documents the search for her father after 20 years of disconnection. With such an intimate topic, this statement is almost disarming; however Sung-A’s style focuses on using a personal story as an access point to bring wider issues into the discussion. Centring around retracing family steps in Seoul, Full of Missing Links touches on the relations between men and women, the strong importance of work in Korean society and the cultural prevalence of drinking covering more than her personal journey.
Performance and reenactment is a powerful way to show what is to come, or what has already happened. Motivated by TV dramas that stage the reunion of missing people, this playful technique allows Sung-A to paint her own portrait of her father as a means to work through her own trauma whilst unearthing the scars left in a society hurting from separation. Contrastingly, re-enactment in Overseas gives an insider look into lives ignored for a myriad of reasons including a lack of empathy, ignorance and the fast-nature of our world. Through such training rehearsals we see these women act out their work, turning it into an art-form that is both expressive and protective. Laughter as the day's training ends breaks through the tension that continues to build as the daunting prospect of leaving for the unknown nears. Taken together both works are studies of separation and sacrifice, with Sung-A-Yoon’s visual language punctuated with performance that hauntingly lingers long after the credits have rolled.
Confronting the disparity between the timely and timeless nature of focusing on migrant issues is undoubtedly necessary. Wanting her work to illuminate topics pushed under the carpet, the deaths and inhumane conditions of migrant workers who built the Qatar World Cup stadiums strike a chord with Sung-A. She reflects on why it remains important to preserve and share these issues to a wider audience. “I hope the mentality of people will change and so will the conditions for domestic workers to see these migrants as people'' rather than disposable interchangeable faces of cheap labour. For one of the workers in the film, Daisy, watching Overseas with her previously abusive employer sparked a moving conversation about her feeling homesick that created more empathy and understanding for Daisy’s position. The toll of this form of labour comes to the fore when a deeper realisation of a system that hurts creates displaced families is considered. Homesickness, emotional anguish and a yearning to return home to connection being the reality of the loneliness faced by these workers, the price of a life overseas speaks volumes.
Sung-A Yoon is greatly tied to these topics surrounding women and their work. Her next project, a fiction feature-length film deals within these margins but also directly unpacks race and with how women deal with their appearance. Not bound to methods or genre, Sung-A’s work deals with separateness and the reality of life for women confined to the margins of society whilst emphasising their strength, determination and the bonds of sisterhood.
Find more of Sung-A Yoon’s work here.