Cannes film shines light on secret life of migrant maids
She was chatting to the "wonderful Ukrainian woman" who looks at her mother, who has Parkinson's Disease, when the housekeeper started telling her about the lover she had taken.
"I realised that our view of migrant women is so wrong," she told AFP at the Cannes film festival, where "Mama" is being shown in the official selection.
"We think of them as poor women sacrificing themselves to do everything for their families.
"But actually as I researched I realised they develop these temporary identities," picking up a little comfort where they can.
When the Ukrainian housekeeper "started working for my parents, they were embarrassed by her and tried to behave as if she wasn't there. It was crazy," Sinai said.
"So I started talking to her and I immediately fell in love with her because she's super funny.
"She's only three years older than me and she has such a dramatic life, which is an absurd contrast to how many people like her are in the shadows of our society" living their own hidden lives.
Israel govt 'doing horrible stuff'
It isn't the first time Sinai has turned received ideas upside down.
She won the Cannes Festival's top prize for short films with "Anna" in 2016, where an overworked mother heads off looking for sex in a small town after getting an unexpected afternoon off from looking after her son.
"Mama" is about a housekeeper who returns home from working for a rich couple in Israel to find her best laid plans for the family she has been bankrolling have been turned upside down in her absence.
"In her attempt to give her daughter something meaningful, she actually lost all the years with her growing up and her ability to connect with her kids," Sinai, 40, said.
Instead she finds her passive, less-than-useless husband has supplanted her as her daughter's confidant.
Sinai's own best laid plans were thrown up in the air by the outbreak of war in Ukraine, with the director forced to switch the story to neighbouring Poland.
Belarus-born Evegenia Dodina, who plays the housekeeper -- best known as Villanelle's mother in "Killing Eve" -- has been winning glowing reviews for her "carefully calibrated performance".
Screen magazine said: "It's not merely that she conveys her joy and sadness, but how emotionally torn her character feels."
War closer to home in Gaza has cast a shadow over "Mama" and other Israeli films at Cannes.
Hundreds of top film figures have signed an open letter condemning Israel for committing "genocide" in Gaza and the film industry for its "passivity".
With scores dying every day in Israeli strikes on Gaza since the festival began last week, Sinai said it was important to make "a clear separation between the government and the Israeli people".
"The government is doing horrible stuff" which many people were opposed to, she told AFP. "I wish the war would end immediately. I will always carry this on my back."
Between Ukraine and Gaza, "it's really a miracle that we managed to make the film happen at this horrible time," Sinai added.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
France 24
3 hours ago
- France 24
Controversy over French weapons shipment to Israel
00:49 05/06/2025 What is the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation and why is it controversial? 05/06/2025 Israeli opposition accuses Netanyahu's government of arming militias in Gaza 05/06/2025 Activist Gaza aid boat slams Israel 'threat' 05/06/2025 Trump announces travel ban and restrictions on 19 countries 05/06/2025 REPLAY: Brazil's Lula and France's Macron joint press conference in Paris 05/06/2025 Key international takeways of Lula and Macron's joint press conference 05/06/2025 Cameroon becomes world's most neglected displacement crisis, NRC reports 05/06/2025 Loïs Boisson, the rising star of French tennis 05/06/2025 Gamers line up for Nintendo Switch 2 on launch day
France 24
4 hours ago
- France 24
Cannes red carpet gets second life as handbags, hats or slippers
The red carpets were replaced daily at the festival, which ended on May 24, with organisers handing over 1.5 tonnes of fine red material to a non-profit organisation in the port city of Marseille. The carpets now sit on pallets or in black waste bags in a warehouse used by the La Reserve des Arts in the deprived northern suburbs of Marseille where they are being sorted, cleaned and prepared for re-use. Some of them have small holes -- possibly a result of hosting all those towering stilettoes -- while others have been marked by footsteps or scuffs. "By reconditioning them, we're helping to reduce the environmental impact of the event -- something the festival is aware of," Jeanne Re, coordinator at La Reserve des Arts, told AFP during a visit on Wednesday. The charity specialises in re-using or "upcycling" products used by the fashion, theatre or other entertainment industries, finding new lives for items that might otherwise have ended up as waste. The approach helps to reduce landfill and is seen as a response to growing public concern about the volume of single-use items used to put on public events. But some environmental groups believe so-called second-life policies can result in "greenwashing", leading organisers and companies to tout their recycling policies rather than focusing on reducing their overall consumption. Cruise footsteps The Cannes carpet is being resold at just one euro a kilo, Re telling AFP that amounted to 33 cents per square metre -- an "unbeatable" price. She added that the goal was to make it "as accessible to as many of our members as possible". Elsa Ramouni-Yordikian, an artist and member who has been using the red carpets for the last four years, told AFP she had used the material for handbags, bucket hats, glasses cases and even bags for wine bottles. Some were "quite unique pieces", she said of her work with the charity Les Nippones. She recently showcased her creations made with the 2024 carpet in an exhibition in Marseille titled "Dress like a Movie Star". "The fact that it comes from a famous festival and is recycled locally -- that makes sense to us," she said. Production of synthetic materials like the red carpets will "never stop, there will always be more, just like festivals and trade shows, so we need to find ways to give them new value", she said. The top prize for best film at this year's Cannes Festival went to dissident Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi for his highly political movie "It Was Just an Accident". The red carpets were walked by a host of entertainment world A-listers from Cruise and Rihanna, who accompanied her rapper partner A$AP Rocky, as well as Halle Berry, Scarlett Johansson and Robert De Niro.
France 24
14 hours ago
- France 24
Sci-fi writer Charles Stross' dark take on Silicon Valley 'religion'
Beyond an exhilarating story, Stross' 2005 book "Accelerando" was a thought experiment with ideas like transhumanism, technological "singularity" and rationalism -- concepts that had been circulating in Silicon Valley from the late 1980s -- and which many believe still animate powerful figures like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. "I was basically trying to bottle up all the future shock I was living with... on the edge of a nervous breakdown from dealing with an exponential growth curve" as an overworked programmer at a dotcom-era startup, Stross told AFP. Originally published as a series of short stories, "Accelerando" went on to win a Locus Award, one of science fiction writing's major honours. The novel follows three generations living through a "singularity" -- a theorised moment when technological progress accelerates to a pace beyond which almost anything becomes possible. Among Stross' inspirations was "Extropians", a pre-social-media mailing list popular among techies that hosted discussions among "some interesting and very odd people... very much into self-improving AI, the singularity, cryonics, space colonisation... they had a strong libertarian bent," he remembers. "Extropians" would also inspire figures like Ray Kurzweil, futurist and Google "AI visionary", who Stross believes "strip-mined" the conversations there for his books predicting the singularity. Chapters of "Accelerando" track anarchic inventor Manfred, who struggles with relatable 21st-century problems like battles over digital copyright and remembering who and where he is without his smart glasses. Another follows his daughter Amber, who uploads her mind into a computer to set off for another star system in the memory banks of a tiny starship. The book also features Amber's son Sirhan, who lives in a solar system largely transformed into computing hardware to support ever-more uploaded minds and AIs. Silicon Valley religion Such out-there scenarios are central to what AI researcher Timnit Gebru and intellectual historian Emile Torres have dubbed "TESCREAL" -- short for "Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism". In a 2024 paper, they described this "bundle" as one of the "ideologies driving the race to attempt to build Artificial General Intelligence" smarter than humans -- and traced its roots back to "the Anglo-American eugenics tradition of the 20th Century". "TESCREAL is what you get when a bunch of relatively bright, technologically-interested former Christians... reinvent religion," Stross said. "Christianity is a template for syncretistic religions" -- belief systems "which pick and match (ideas) from all over the place and glom them together," he added. "TESCREAL is doing exactly the same thing with a bunch of technology-related memes." Some statements and projects of today's tech titans echo this complex of beliefs, which foresees humans evolving beyond their present form, achieving immortality -- perhaps by merging with AI -- and multiplying throughout the universe. Elon Musk, for example, has spoken about making humans a "multiplanetary" species, was one of the original backers of OpenAI's stated mission to develop "artificial intelligence (that) benefits all of humanity" and founded Neuralink, a brain implant startup that aims to one day "expand how we experience the world". And OpenAI boss Sam Altman mused in a 2017 blog post about when humans would "merge" with machines, a process he believed "has already started" and "is probably going to happen sooner than most people think". 'Escapist fiction, big ideas' Stross said that with the likes of Musk close to power in the Trump administration and the threat of climate change hanging over the world, he is "fleeing screaming from writing about the near future". With "reality around us going to hell in a handbasket," he sees his aversion to the present mirrored in readers' appetite for "cosy escapist stuff". "I'm an entertainer... although I've always tried to do entertainment by combining regular escapist fiction with some big ideas," Stross said. Two decades later, his writing is circling back to TESCREAL as he imagines a future where its promises go unrealised. "What if there is not a singularity but everybody believes in it?" he mused. "What if we get half-baked versions of the tech?" His current projects include a story in which humanity's far-future descendants "have religions... based on TESCREAL, and there are holy wars over who will be allowed to set the rules in the AI upload heaven that nobody's actually built yet."
