CANNES: Or Sinai didn’t have to go far to find the subject of her acclaimed debut film about the secret lives of the millions of women who support their families back home by being domestic workers abroad.

She was chatting to the “wonderful Ukrainian woman” who looks after 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 said 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 said.

“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.

“The film is about wanting people to feel love for other people and that’s the only thing I can do, to spread love instead of war.”

Published in Dawn, May 21st, 2025