When Mother Comes Home for Christmas

A ‘cinéma vérité’ documentary that sketches an unusual portrait of a community of migrant women whose lives usually remain unnoticed. Josephine, a migrant from Sri Lanka, works in a suburb of Athens. She has at last got the long-sought ‘good’ job, a dream for many women from the countryside. She has a good salary so she can care for two-year-old Isadora. In the Christmas holidays, Isadora’s mother comes over from Paris. For the first time in eight years for Christmas Josephine can go to her home country, where she is also confronted for the first time with her three children, who have so far grown up in orphanages and know nothing of their mother apart from bank slips, letters and gifts. Josephine’s short visit evokes a real spectrum of complicated emotions.