Migration begins at home: a Philippine story
Migration begins at home – a Filipina story
Most Filipinos are poor, and migration is part of the culture, often to countries that colonised them. Life in a Catholic country where divorce is illegal is very hard when families need one member to migrate. Women workers often live in conditions of domestic slavery, where a private life is impossible.
Graham Douglas
The Philippines, an archipelago east of Vietnam, was colonised by Spain in 1565 after Magellan discovered the islands, where he was killed in 1521. They were sold to the US, as part of the treaty ending the brief Spanish - American War in 1898. Independence only came in 1946, after they were occupied by Japan during WW2. As well as the native language, Tagalog, Spanish is still spoken, and English is the official language used in state schools, which leads many people to migrate to English-speaking countries, where many work as cleaners, and some as nurses. About 10 million Philippinos live abroad temporarily or permanently out of a population of about 117 million; four million in the US, and about 165,000 in both the UK and Spain. A smaller number live in Portugal which is where Leonor Noivo began making her film Bulakna.
She began studying photography but switched to cinema as a medium better-adapted to storytelling, and several of her short films have wone prizes internationally: Bulakna is her first feature film, which was recently awarded a prize at the FID festival in Marseille. She was born in Portugal in 1976 and moved with her mother to the ex-Portuguese colony of Macau aged seven. Returning to Portugal she joined the ESTC film school in 1997. She is co-founder of the Terratreme film collective.
I spoke to Leonor after her film was shown at the DocLisboa film festival in Lisbon.
You were born in Portugal, but you grew up in Macau.
My mother was also emigrating when she was young, and I was the only kid with her. I was seven, and I grew up there in my childhood and teenager. During that period, I met Filipino women working there. They were travelling by boat to Macau, and it was very hard for them, and being young, I didn't understand how so many young women went alone to work in another country where they don't know the language and they stayed there sometimes almost their whole lives working. When I came to Lisbon, I started to see many Filipino workers on Sunday when they have the day off, and I recognised the dialect, because I know some words in Tagalog. I was wondering how they lived here in Europe, even further away from their home country, and I began to go to see, to work, to talk with them. I met Norma, and we started to make a documentary about Filipino workers in Portugal. We went with Norma at Christmas in 2023 to see her family, and I found a new reality in the Philippines, which you see in the film. I wanted to talk about different perspectives in the two countries, so it turned out to be a feature, not another short film.
Most previous stories and documentaries have focused on the life that migrants experience when they arrive in a new country. Your film in contrast, shows the kind of life that they left behind, what they miss and what they're hoping to gain. But I still want to ask, why you left out the experiences that they had in Lisbon?
The film started out with three characters in Portugal, but it was very important to go to their home country to see how and why people choose to emigrate. And it was difficult to film inside the houses where they lived and worked in Portugal, so that material was more superficial and we cut it.
I wanted to talk more about what is left when you stay all your life abroad. And Alma represents this in the film because she really feels solitude and she's always wondering if she made the right choice. But now she has to continue, because she can't afford to return to the Philippines. So, she accepts being alone and helping her kids to grow up, forgetting about herself. Melissa is young and very naïve, so putting these two generations together, we can think about what future Melissa may have. Maybe she will be alone for 30 years, even though she's thinking of only going for two years.
I was very touched that the island life seems so far away from Manila, the very simple intimacy where people talk directly about their feelings. One of them said ‘life normally walks, but sometimes it runs’. That's such beautiful poetic and philosophical language. And you see what an enormous contrast it's going to be for someone leaving that life to come to Europe. Does Melisa really understand that?
All her friends are talking about it, but maybe she's not thinking it will be so hard. Rozel had a very bad experience, and she tries to explain to her. Rozel is not the submissive invisible woman that employers want, and she was sacked. Melissa is not aware of how invisible they are expected to be. She's representing all of the women I saw there. I did interviews in the training schools and it’s all about improving your situation and helping your family in a poor country. But we were always thinking how half of the world, the South, is working supporting the North.
The old colonial story: cheap labour.
And we are still living that post-colonial thing. The name Philippines comes from the 16th Century Spanish king Philip II.
And the Americans until after WW2.
The Philippines schools are in English. It's very strange how your country speaks another language in the schools. It's still a colonisation. They teach in English, because it's preparing children to go abroad. They don't speak in Tagalog.
The women sacrifice a lot for their families, but do they create an over-nice image of their lives to show people back home?
I know many Filipinos now in Lisbon, they are together on Sundays, but they really live with very little, because they send all their money to the Philippines, to the family. Norma lives this contradiction because when she returned to the Philippines, she was helping her nephews and saying, she will help them to see an agency.
It's part of the culture now, that many people really want to go abroad. Men work on ships, and they stay abroad nine or 10 months at a time.
This was first published with images and links at:
https://theprisma.co.uk/2025/11/03/migration-begins-at-home-a-filipina-story/