The idea of making a program about similarities among people from different parts of the world started about ten years ago. When I immigrated to Mexico in 1985, many friends and family members, as well as people here in Mexico, started asking me if I didn’t feel very different being here; if it wasn’t too weird, or if I was not afraid of being so far away, in a country so different from mine. And, after thinking about it for a while, the answer was no. My daily life isn’t that different from the daily life of any woman, in the same conditions as mine, in a lot of other countries in the world.
There are many superficial differences, but we all have to get up in the morning, prepare our children and send them to school; take care of them, worry about them and sometimes get angry with them. We have to work to live, either in the field, in our office, or in our homes. We all dream of getting a house of our own and see our children succeed. Our dreams and fears are very similar.
Instead of that, most of the programs in the media show us an image of foreign countries that make the people appear very “exotic” with no possibility of feeling identified with them, nor a way to recognize anything compared to our own reality. Especially third world countries are described in a way that is seldom recognizable for the people who live there.
A postman in Denmark may have a bigger house than a postman in Zimbabwe (or he may not!) but the way they live their daily life is probably very similar. The way of raising the children and the position of the woman in the family may be different but preoccupation about the children’s education, and the effort to give them a better future than our own, are the same.
The encounters between people with different nationalities, who generally don’t have the resources to travel and see the world by themselves, and the fact that the protagonists work in the same profession, are crucial for the development of the film.
It was very important for me to make a film against racism, which as Carlos Fuente says, is generally due to unfamiliarity with the other. I did not want to make a traditional denouncing documentary but find a positive way to lessen the fear of the other.
This is my first work as a director, even though I have worked in many other fields of film production for 20 years.
Madeleine Bondy
Cholula 2004