Mâine Mă Duc - Tomorrow I Leave

What are you willing to accept in order to have a good life? Maria works as a 24-hour caregiver in Vienna. She sees her family in Ibănesti, a village in Romania, only every other month. Her two sons are growing up in part without her and her parents are actually in need of help. Maria Lisa Pichler and Lukas Schöffel calmly observe the reality of life as a migrant worker. The filmmakers travel with Maria in her car to and from Austria, and observe her as she cares for a woman in Vienna and then spends everyday life in Romania with her family. The film resembles a single, dialectical parallel montage in which the alternating scenes of work abroad and the family life left behind reveal a rampant inequality. The successive images of the well-groomed Austrian woman and Maria’s parents working on their small Romanian farm reverberate. A playful scene gets to the heart of the dilemma in Europe when a friend of Maria’s son films people his own age and asks them what future career they would like. Everyone tells of what their dream job would be and that they would like to pursue this in Romania. But when he asks what would make them want to go abroad, their answer, in unison, is “money.” Where documentary films about existences like Maria’s often overflow with emotion or fatalism, Pichler and Schöffel succeed in bringing about an unobtrusive closeness that creates intimacy. Maria is never shown as a passive victim: she explains and defends herself, demonstrates and fights. A scene filmed casually in front of the family home, in which one son complains to Maria that she is never there, raises the question as to which direction the a se duce (“going”) of the title is meant: to the money or back to the family. For Maria, this question arises every month all over again. (Patrick Holzapfel)

Translation: John Wojtowicz