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A Working Mom

Directed by: Yaron Kaftori, Limor Pinhasov
75 Minutes, 2006

A story which demonstrates the extremes Mothers would go to, in order to save their families – sometimes saving and losing them in the same act. In 1990, 22-year-old Marisa Villozial, left her 3-year-old son and her infant daughter with her parents in Bolivia, and traveled oversea to look for a job in the West. She spent fifteen years doing hard menial labor in Israel, sending her pay home, following the growth of her children only through periodic phone calls. In February 2005, Marisa returned to Bolivia to reunite with her children and family and try to become a real mother. Marisa’s return to Cochabamba was a very emotional and upsetting one. Her children, now 16 and 18, were quiet apathetic not to say hostile toward her. They both insisted on calling her Auntie and not Mother, and refused to listen or spent time with her. The house that was to have been built for her with the money she sent turned out to be only a skeleton of a house. With teary eyes she realized she was misled, and that the money she’d sent to her father for the house had been squandered. Her story is a real-life family drama that reflects powerful and painful global themes: poverty, preservation of culture, alienation and is placement in the new global economy. It is an individual story that is the most universal story of our times.

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