The film follows Luz, an undocumented Filipina cleaner at a Swiss luxury ski resort. That’s even the worst situation in some cases, and we were really hoping that this movie could also speak for Indonesian people,” Locher says. Luz, played by Mercedes Cabral, may lose custody of her children to her husband back home.
To prevent that, she works extra hard and, lured by the legal document and higher pay promised by a Swiss gangmaster, becomes a labor trafficker herself. The reality turns out to be a pipe dream. Locher calls the world it exposes “the dirty side of the Swiss postcard.” Alexis Manenti also stars.
Close Up Films produced the film, with JBA Production co-producing and Be For Films handling sales. Locher and Alipio, who co-wrote and co-directed the film, first met at the Busan International Film Festival. When Locher later set out to tell a story about “people who live in the shadow of Switzerland,” he reached out to Alipio, who agreed to collaborate.
Alipio trained under Filipino artist Armando “Bing” Lao and works with his “found story” approach, in which filmmakers merge real-life cases into fiction. The pair researched on site at Swiss luxury resorts, talking to undocumented workers from countries including Serbia, Sri Lanka and the Philippines. Alipio has run into the assumption herself: one of Locher’s neighbors once asked if she was his cleaner.
Locher corrected the neighbor – she was his colleague. I do not want the Filipinas to be portrayed as cleaners, but that is our reality. It was a hard pill to swallow,” Alipio tells Variety.
She still finds the partnership beautiful, because she and Locher represent the two countries in the story and, together, amplify the voices within it. It was Alipio, Locher says, who insisted from the start that Luz not be reduced to a victim because she’s undocumented, “because she must be a very ambitious woman. Otherwise she would never be in Switzerland.” That ambition tests her loyalty to her Filipino colleagues, who support each other like sisters.
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