Care drain and substitute mothering in women’s documentary film: Towards a transnational family model?

Abstract

This article reads Teodora Ana Mihai’s documentary Waiting for August in the light of recent documentaries focusing on migration, such as Maid in America (2004) and Children in No Man’s Land (2008) by Anayansi Prado, as an approach to a particular form of social violence whose victims are children or teenagers who grow up without immediate adult care across the contemporary global world. I analyse these documentaries by women filmmakers, focusing on the transfer of care from mothers to elder sisters as a result of women’s economic transnational migration. I argue that they promote a model of self-sustaining, responsible motherhood based on women’s strong claim to a life of dignity and self-determination, as opposed to compromising solutions that have long been tolerated and even encouraged by patriarchal societal and political structures.