A new documentary film by Maren Wickwire set in Cyprus and the Philippines.
The Cyprus Center for Intercultural Studies in collaboration with the University of Nicosia’s UNESCO Chair on “Cultural Diversity and Intercultural Dialogue for a Culture of Peace” would like to invite you to the public screening of Maren Wickwire’s documentary entitled “Together Apart.”
The screening will take place at Cine Studio on Monday, 29 October 2018 at 18:30.
There will be a question-and-answer session with the director after the film screening. The event is supported by the Mediterranean Institute of Gender Studies.
SYNOPSIS
When Guil Ann arrives on the Mediterranean island Cyprus to join her mother as a domestic worker, the women reunite for the first time in over a decade. Joining the global workforce of Filipinas abroad, Carren spent most of her adult life apart from her children. Only months later, unexpected events lead to Carren’s deportation and challenge both women to confront their precarious dreams for togetherness and a better future.
“Together Apart” is an intimate family portrait of two indigenous women, shifting between the temporary present and future imagination of serial migrants. The film contemplates notions of self-hood, belonging and transnational motherhood, sharing insights into the complex web of global care chains beyond the stereotypical narrative of victimization and sacrifice.
Event Programme
Welcome addresses by
- Dr Marilena Zackheos, Director of The Cyprus Center for Intercultural Studies
- Dr Emilios A. Solomou, Director of the UNESCO Chair of the University of Nicosia on “Cultural Diversity and Intercultural Dialogue for a Culture of Peace”
Documentary Screening
Q&A Session with Mrs Maren Wickwire, Director of “Together Apart”
Director’s Bio
Maren Wickwire holds an M.A. in Visual and Media Anthropology from the Freie Universität in Berlin and studied film and communications design at the Folkwang Hochschule Essen. As the founder of Manifest Media, a nomadic film production company, she has wide-ranging experience in directing, producing and filming documentaries as well as working with multivocal video installations. Maren’s work has been screened at international film festivals and she is a recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts grant. In her practice-led research, she is focusing on women’s issues, globalization, migration and peacemaking as well as conflict resolution. Currently, she is conducting research in Cyprus on migrant workers and foreign students and has completed her most recent film on transnational motherhood “Together Apart”. She lives in the United States and works globally.
In her new documentary “Together Apart”, German-born director Maren Wickwire takes a closer look at these changes, focusing on Filipino domestic workers in Cyprus. Whereas most media coverage anonymizes these groups through telling individual stories, these people are given a face, a comprehensible narrative to raise awareness as well as discussion about their issues
Rouven Linnarz, Review from the Asian Movie PulseThe defining success of Maren Wickwire’s film is its intervention in the translation processes of migration that often turn Self to Other. By highlighting the Filipina domestic workers’ own experiences of displacement in Cyprus, “Together Apart” asserts and celebrates its protagonists as significant subjects of history, globalization, and the multicultural reality of contemporary Cyprus. Guil Ann and her mother Carren expose displacement as a challenge, an opportunity, an anxiety, a delight, a loneliness, a longing, and a series of losses. Displacement is a weak internet signal on a rooftop in the Philippines through which to connect on Facetime; it is carefree comradery on a much-needed night out for karaoke in Old Nicosia; it is a box of modest gifts finally reaching its intended recipients notwithstanding miscellaneous travel hurdles across continents. At the core is the perseverance of human intimacy or the profound connection of one Self to another in a state of being apart.
Dr Marilena Zackheos, Director of The Cyprus Center for Intercultural Studies, Assistant Professor of Social Sciences at the University of Nicosia