Typhoon Mama

Lou Strömberg: Typhoon Mama.

National Competition 1
Tampere International Film Festival (TFF)
Plevna 2, Tampere, 4 March 2020.
In Filipino, Swedish, English and Finnish. With English / Finnish subtitles.
Q&A with Lou Strömberg, Pertti Veijalainen (P), Jussi Saivo (M).

TYPHOON MAMA

Lou Strömberg | Finland 2019 | Documentary | 79 min

TFF: "The director's stepmother Yolanda, a Filipino woman married and living in Sweden, faces a balancing act for many immigrants: working a gruelling job as a maid to keep up with having to pay unrealistic remittances to her three sons back home in the Philippines. When a drug war breaks out in the Philippines, the family dynamics are put to test."

"Typhoon Mama on dokumenttielokuva ohjaajan äitipuolesta Yolandasta. Hän asuu kahden maailman välissä: Ruotsin, missä hän on asunut yli 20 vuotta ja Filippiinien, missä hänen kolme aikuista poikaansa vielä asuvat. He uskovat Euroopan olevan El Dorado, missä rahaa saa helposti ja painostavatkin Yolandalta sitä. Kun huumesota syttyy Filippiineillä, ravistelee se myös perhesuhteita." TFF

AA: A family documentary reflecting two worlds: desperate conditions in the Philippines and affluence in the West, Sweden appearing as paradise.

Mother Yolanda seems to be stuck in a life sentence of motherhood, toiling around the clock in Sweden, emptying her partner's bank account, appearing as a fairytale figure in the Philippines with lavish gifts reflecting "an immense accumulation of commodities", still keeping her sons although they have grown up by now. It's a tragedy of a multiple exploitation. The typhoon mama's love is bottomless but one-sided. Instead, the sons complain about the absence of the mother in their lives.

I keep being amazed at the possibility of making such intimate and revealing documentaries of families. There are multiple scenes where I feel like watching enactments, the protagonists playing parts in their lives. The relationship of the film's events to reality is constantly puzzling. This is the age of reality television: nothing is outside the possibility of being filmed.

The visual quality of the image is variable in the extreme. Hardly ever do the characters speak in their native language. Bad Swedish, bad English, etc., is dominant, which is part of the documentary reality. But it is hard to relate to people who are seen expressing themselves only in an extremely limited range of their human dimensions.