How do you like to spend your weekends? Do you take time as you please? Do you dedicate your free day having fun or for resting? What do you do with your secular treasure? Social convention on not working at the end of the week is it is about freedom to let go and let be. Weekends come in a variety of different activities depending on who they are and where and how they live. As Canadian architect Witold Rybczynski wrote in his essay “Waiting for the Weekend” once a week is "something both simpler and more profound: a measure of ordinary, everyday life."
For some Filipina domestic workers in Hong Kong, makeovers define their break off the workweek.
Hong Kong is simply not a stage. It is a place within which contests are ever present and struggled beyond the performative. Over the last few decades, the British colony underwent rapid process of industrialization which had a huge impact on women. Middle class women moved from their traditional domestic role to have careers as urban salariat. As a result, migrant labour, primarily from the Philippines, were relied upon to fill in the work around the clock. The lifestyle of an average Filipina domestic worker is one of unremitting toil: unsuitable accommodations, emotional isolation, and poor slave-like work conditions as can be seen in the 2017 installation of artist and architect Tings Chak. The public spaces then are transformed as communes for temporary pomp and festivities.
Every Sunday a beauty queen is crowned. Thus the title of the documentary Sunday Beauty Queen.
Director Babyruth Villarama helps shed a light to the stories of a handful of particular characters pieced together by their lived experiences below the shadows of the fragrant harbour's towers. The plot starts off with one of the pageants. Right after, the camera follows the contours of the everyday lives of the ‘queens’ and organizer to get close-ups to individual characters that reflect universal tales of recognition after a period of neglect. Each of the five subjects are given fairly equal exposure, as their own narratives are paced back and forth across the runtime. The cohesion of the narratives intertwined shows how the filmmaker has a very good hold of the storytelling structure.
Poignant moments are raw footages that connects to the viewers core not in a didactic manner but is reflective of collective insight and a milieu of shared feelings. The strongest scenes were the quietest—when they lose a job by getting terminated, or by the death of their employer, they struggle to find new employment, or else, face deportation.
Sunday Beauty Queen is affecting and straightforward. Although it wanders at times, the focus remains on the intimate details due in no small part to the the relationships the production team have build with the subjects for four years of on-and-off shooting. Amidst the film’s treatment of showing the self-organizing, self-fashioning wage earners, little notice was taken to show a greater depth of their sociopolitical context. Demonstrating the capacity for self-help, the carpet is laid for the withdrawal of the state’s responsibility to support for basic human needs and to set limits on consumption. Nonetheless, viewers get a vivid picture of how some workers, who happen to be migrant workers performing household services in foreign lands, spend their time during their days off.
Weekends give us chance to reimagine ways to overcome the pervasiveness of social alienation at work.
Sunday Beauty Queen
Director: Babyruth Villarama. Producer: Chuck Gutierrez. Executive producers: Ed Rocha, Fernando Ortigas, Vincent Nebrida. Co-producer: Tetsuo Maki. Camera (color): Dexter dela Pena. Editor: Chuck Gutierrez. In English, Tagalog, Visayan, Cantonese. Running time: 95 minutes.
Starring: Cherry Mae Bretana, Hazel Perdido, Mylyn Jacobo, Leo Selomenio, Rudelie Acosta