Berlin-based independent filmmaker Roser Corella started her career as video-journalist for Catalan television, but her interest in the human stories behind global issues moved her to self-produce and develop a personal vision within the documentary field. Her work has been worldwide and won numerous awards. “Machine Man,” “Prisoners of Kanun,” and “Grab and Run” are among her credits.
“Room Without a View” is screening at the 2021 Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Film Festival, which takes place April 29-May 9. The fest is digital this year due to COVID-19. Streaming is geo-blocked to Canada.
W&H: Describe the film for us in your own words:
RC: “Room Without a View” is a kaleidoscopic gaze on the exploitative working conditions experienced by migrant domestic workers hired under the kafala — or sponsorship — system in Lebanon. The film explores the culture of abuse governing Lebanese society throughout all its complex layers: from the legal framework that creates a structure of power and control conducive to corruption and abuse; analyzing architectural patterns of the city founded on racism; to the private sphere that reproduces a patriarchal system that discriminates against Lebanese women, which, in turn, undermines the rights of foreign domestic workers in the household.
The film aims to offer new insights to suggest another dimension of awareness and understanding of the widespread migrant domestic workers in Lebanon — and its cause. The result is a hybrid of creative narrative and investigative filmmaking with a polyvalent approach.
W&H: What drew you to this story?
RC: I started this project a few years ago in Bangladesh, where I was working on another documentary at the time. There, I discovered that many women migrate to the Middle East — 90 percent go to Lebanon — as domestic workers and such labor serves as one of the nation’s main sources of income. I interviewed women who had returned from Lebanon and they all told me about their harrowing experiences. I then decided to follow the trail of girls who planned to travel to Lebanon.
I realized most of these girls were recruited from rural areas and did not have adequate information about the working conditions that awaited them in Lebanon, and agencies lied to them about the work they were going to do. So this business became a problem of human trafficking covered up with the legal framework of the kafala system, which grants total impunity to agents and employers. It is a system that promotes racism, abuse, and exploitation. I was shocked to discover a system that promoted a new form of slavery.
The kafala system began in the 1950s in the Gulf Cooperation Council member states and a few neighboring countries, and was used to monitor migrant laborers working primarily in the construction and domestic sectors. The initial economic objective was to provide short-term, rotating labor that could be swiftly brought into the country in periods of economic boom, and then expelled during less prosperous periods.
The kafala system requires all unskilled laborers to have an in-country sponsor — usually their employer — who is responsible for their visa and legal status. This practice has been criticized by human rights organizations for creating easy opportunities for the exploitation of workers, as many employers confiscate passports and abuse their workers but evade legal repercussions.
W&H: What do you want people to think about after they watch the film?
RC: I want viewers to realize that capitalism had always a hidden partner, especially in exploiting the woman who does unpaid domestic work: millions of hours of unpaid work done in silence and is the lifeblood of all other forms of work. This idea that work is performed out of love for the family has stuck with women, as if it were part of their nature or an inherent responsibility.
Since women started to increasingly take on paid work outside the home, women from developing countries have replaced the more privileged women in that domestic role, in ways such as childcare and homemaking. But it is still work that is not valued, and this is partly the root problem of racism, discrimination, and exploitation of foreign domestic workers in Lebanon. I am interested in giving visibility and value to this necessary yet never-ending work.
I know that the impact of this film will be very different if the viewer comes from a country where the kafala system exists, if the audience comes from a different background where it’s common to have a live-in maid, or even if it’s someone who hears on this system for a first time.
What is important to me is that “Room Without a View” can be a tool to raise awareness about the exploitative working conditions of migrant domestic workers in Lebanon, and the legal framework that creates a structure that grants all power and impunity to the employer. Raising awareness is about creating a change for the better: a change in perception, action, or behavior.
No matter where the film will be shown, I would like it to move people; to open their eyes; to trigger a public debate; to change established opinion and mindsets; or to even inspire a tangible improvement such as a practical change in regulations, policies, and procedures. In Lebanon, this system is normalized by the society and this must change. Domestic workers are trapped in slavery and Lebanon’s persisting racist culture, yet it is a very complex issue where many parties are involved. I wanted to initiate a dialogue between the parties that normally do not communicate: domestic workers, employers, the Ministry of Labour, and professional experts such as architects, lawyers, etc. The documentary addresses mindsets and stereotypes prevailing in Lebanon.
Films can have a profound effect on people. It’s crucial to create a wider discussion about inequality and difficulties regarding migrant domestic workers in Lebanon, who are excluded from the Labor Law. They are the most vulnerable workers in the country since they don’t have any right as laborers. Instances of abuse are common, and it has been estimated that two migrant workers die each week in Lebanon, often through suicide or while attempting to escape. And those who successfully flee later face imprisonment or heavy fines.
Abolishing the kafala system would vastly improve the rights of workers in Lebanon. I hope the film can have an impact on Lebanese society way of thinking and may even have the power to shake up established stereotypes and mindsets. I hope “Room Without a View” will have very deep echoes among the Lebanese society, then an international audience, and eventually, put pressure for a concrete change by questioning the legitimacy of a system that promotes discrimination and new forms of slavery in the 21st century.
Today, Lebanon is facing huge challenges. The combination of an acute economic crisis and decades of rampant corruption has pushed the country to the edge. Despite recent reforms, the country’s legal system is rife with legislation that discriminate against women. The crash of the local currency has already led to triple-digit inflation. Lebanon’s jaw-dropping economic crisis — which erupted in October 2019 with a popular revolution — and has since slashed the Lebanese lira’s value by 90 percent.
The crisis worsened with the spread of COVID-19 and the massive blast at Beirut’s port in August 2020. This crisis has also exposed a political system in which women are chronically underrepresented, and even more so migrant women who are kept without any rights under the kafala system. Lebanon should transform its government to urgently implement reforms that are more inclusive of women at all levels of society. It’s time to abolish the kafala system!
W&H: What was the biggest challenge in making the film?
RC: The biggest challenge of this film was gaining access to Lebanese families that would divulge their perspective of the system and their personal experiences of living in the same house with a foreign worker. Although it is normalized — three out of four families have a foreign live-in maid — families know that there is something wrong with the system. So it is very difficult for them to talk openly about it.
When you work as a freelancer like me, it is important to spend a lot of time with people — and not always with the camera — to find the right access to stories. For me, it’s very important to first understand the context, the culture, and the society before approaching people. Whatever your opinion about an issue it is, you have to approach all parties involved respectfully, and with the aim of understanding their perspective, their norms, their mentality rather than with the arrogant attitude of a foreigner who approaches with judgement. And that’s how I finally got their testimonies.
I spent a lot of time in Beirut: I lived there for a year and then spent two more visiting back and forth for some months. I gradually built my network of contacts that led me to access the people featured in the documentary. It was a matter of time and patience. I started interviewing the families without the camera but only a microphone and, in this way, it was easier for them to open up about their experiences with migrant women.
Many did not want to talk in front of the camera, so I kept recording interviews until I found someone who would speak in front of the camera. In Lebanon, it is important to gain people’s trust by spending time with them, sharing a coffee together, or eating with them, and I did this on many occasions. You can’t aggressively go into people’s houses with a camera.
On the one hand, they know that it is a taboo subject because the news reports on cases of abuse, but on the other hand, the system is so normalized that when they start to talk about their experiences as employers it becomes clear how commonplace racism and unfair treatment of these workers are.
W&H: How did you get your film funded? Share some insights into how you got the film made.
RC: It is not easy to find funding for documentaries, especially in the early stages of research. All grants require a preview of the access you have to the subject and characters, as well as the previous research you conducted before applying for the grant. This means that when starting a new project, you must self-fund the first trips to a country in cases where the setting is not where you live as well as the first shooting in order to apply for funds for the development and production.
Problems may arise when this initial phase takes too long, and you cannot afford to further self-finance the project’s development. This is a crucial phase because, in documentary, you are dealing with real people — whom you have managed to motivate to participate — and you cannot disappear for a long time until you get the necessary funding. It is important to follow up with your subjects and sometime, current issues are no longer current if you take too long to produce the film.
This was the case with “Room Without a View,” which I started some years ago but had to stop due to financial issues. There was a hiatus, but finally I got funding from the Berlin Senate and the Ministry of Culture in Austria for creative films, which was the key to complete production and post-production.
In between, the Goethe-Institut in Lebanon together with the Beirut Art Center offered two-month residency grants for filmmakers, which helped me spend time in the country and establish better connections with local people.
W&H: What inspired you to become a filmmaker?
RC: Storytelling is a basic human need. I believe in stories and their incredible power to keep people alive, to keep both the living and the dead alive. Stories attract us, move us, and inspire us to be better human beings. Documentaries in particular are very attractive for spectators, I think. People are always drawn to true, real life stories.
When I was 11 years old, I discovered the pleasure of framing reality using my father’s Video8 camera. I studied art and photography at university, but it wasn’t until years later that I discovered the magic of approaching other people’s lives and the power of storytelling! The camera became a passport into other people’s lives, like a door that opens to other realities and frames them in a narrative. It never ceases to amaze me how many incredible stories are out there that enable us to learn from other lives — the vast variety of backgrounds, of traditions, of ways of thinking, of understanding the world!
In documentary filmmaking, having a huge amount of interest and curiosity for the world are indispensable traits. But we cannot forget how necessary it is to have a clear sociopolitical attitude and the willingness to take full responsibility for your own statements. I started by making reports for TV, where I learned a lot about visual language and storytelling, but I realized that the TV medium still maintains a traditional storytelling structure — that’s when I decided to start self-producing my own documentaries to have more freedom in the way I approached stories and be creative in my storytelling.
W&H: What advice do you have for other women directors?
RC: Women are self-determined, active, and powerful in the societies they inhabit. My personal message to women is simply, “Never give up, never lose heart!”
We are witnessing a slow but steady awakening to the film industry’s failure to properly represent women. There is also an underrepresentation of women behind the camera. We need women storytellers to dismantle the patriarchal scheme that has colonized culture since the beginnings. Because storytelling is a basic human need, it should be available to and equally representative of all voices.
Although many wins have happened in recent years, there is still inequity in the industry and a clear need to include more women’s voices at the forefront. We need to militantly work to shrink the gender gap and to celebrate the work of women by sharing it with a global audience. We need our own stories to remind us where we have been, where we are, and where we plan to be moving forward.
It’s time for women and women’s stories to get recognition, so that the younger generations can see what the options are — and what they can be.
W&H: Name your favorite woman-directed film and why.
RC: I don’t have one favorite film, but many that have made an impact on me, inspired me aesthetically, and affected me through the sensitivity with which a director approached a subject. I learn from every film and I hope to continue to see films that move me or change something in the way I see the world. That’s what documentaries are for.
I will name two that I liked very much: “Tempestad” is a Mexican documentary directed by Tatiana Huezo, who rehearses a possibility. She presents the stories of two women, Miriam and Adela, whose personal experiences with organized crime — and the impunity that floods the Mexican judicial system — serve to expose the social decomposition plaguing the entire country. Its structure interweaves the voices of each woman as we travel the country’s highways, from northern to southern cartel territory, a minefield that is difficult to negotiate.
The documentary’s distressing stories reveal an apparent rock bottom with no possible light in the future. In this sense, “Tempestad” is a film about fear, a sensation that gradually suffocates us all, that anaesthetizes us, and that seems to be not only the consequence but also cause of silence.
I love Huezo’s work for the sensitivity in her approach to bloody situations. Departing from documentary and film conventions of hyperviolent depictions, “Tempestad” avoids morbid images and appeals to the evocation of the emptiness that violence produces, ultimately promoting empathy. In the film, it is the landscape, always on the verge of exploding, that expresses all the desolation that remains silenced, invisible.
Iryna Tsilyk’s “The Earth Is Blue as an Orange” focuses on a single mother, Anna, and her four children, portraying their daily lives through their own filmmaking as a way to cope with the daily trauma of living in a warzone in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. Through a collaborative and multilayered film construction, the documentary echoes the filmmaking process of Anna’s family during shifting balances and fragile grounds. Unforgiving grey landscapes and military interventions loom over the family, while their collective and individual intimacies intertwine within the creative process, serving as an act of resistance against five years of ruthless brutality.
The film’s title, “The Earth Is Blue as an Orange,” is never contextualized in the film. It comes from a surrealist Paul Éluard poem, “La terre est bleue comme une orange,” and apparently refers to improbable contradictions in everyday life: states of terror, despair and familial joy coming throughout Tsilyk’s portrait of Myroslava, her three younger siblings, and their enterprising single mother Anna as they forge collaborative art between juddering bomb blasts in their hometown of Krasnohorivka, on the front line of the war.
I love the way this film portrays the War in Donbas through the prism of a Ukrainian family’s own filmmaking process. Tsilyk opens a window to the process of Anna and her family committing their wartime experience to camera, and it’s sometimes hard to say which film is within which. It’s very interesting because the medium of documentary is itself under scrutiny here, serving not just as our window into the subjects’ lives but their own malleable survival strategy.
W&H: How are you adjusting to life during the COVID-19 pandemic? Are you keeping creative, and if so, how?
RC: It’s not easy staying creative during these uncertain times and for me, it’s been a sedentary period — because I’m used to travelling non-stop — one that helped me focus on editing. On the other hand, as I spend many hours at home, I’m reading and watching films more than ever, which means inspiration and research for future projects.
To be honest, not knowing how much longer this situation will last often makes it hard to plan ahead and even more difficult to stay motivated for the creative process. But I want to stay positive: after all, it is a time we can use to learn a lot about ourselves. I see it as a sowing season from which we will reap the fruits later on — and I hope it will be a good harvest!
W&H: The film industry has a long history of underrepresenting people of color onscreen and behind the scenes and reinforcing — and creating — negative stereotypes. What actions do you think need to be taken to make Hollywood and/or the doc world more inclusive?
RC: The dominant, Western documentary tradition has become too standardized — and that is just one of many reasons to be open to approaches from other regions and tackle the unabashed prominence of white Westerners. During the last few years, festivals have started to promote the inclusion of people of color on screen and behind the scenes, but it is still not enough. I think that if the documentary film industry doesn’t modernize itself, it will die. Western industry can start by looking to underrepresented areas in Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America with the clear aim of creating greater inclusion and artistic diversity in festival programming.
In the same spirit, festivals should make an effort to include films from other parts of the world. This requires decisive action because films from non-Western countries do not automatically land on their table for the selection process. Facilities must be created to make it easier for films produced by people of color to reach festival programmers. And in the selection process, perhaps have a quota of films in the program where underrepresented groups are guaranteed a spot. But this should only be a transitional process until the presence of these films in festivals is normalized.
However, I don’t think it is the responsibility of only festivals to create inclusion and diversity in their programs. A global change in the mentality of the entire film industry is needed: starting from the film schools that are currently only open to privileged students, to the institutions that provide funding to produce films. Both access to film schools and access to production funds must be available to everyone, from the poorest to the most privileged countries. Diversity brings richness to cinema!
