Korean Premiere | 2015 Berlin International Film Festival – Panorama Audience Award / 2015 Sundance Film Festival – Special Jury Award for Acting

Synopsis
Val is the kind of live-in housekeeper who takes her work seriously. She serves her wealthy Sao Paulo employers day in and day out while lovingly nannying their teenage son whom she’s raised since toddlerhood. Everyone and everything in the elegant house has its place until one day, Val’s ambitious, clever daughter Jessica arrives from Val’s hometown to take the college entrance exams. Jessica’s confident, youthful presence upsets the unspoken yet strict balance of power in the household; Val must decide where her allegiances lie and what she’s willing to sacrifice.

Program Note
A realistic motherhood drama about the generation gap between a mother and her daughter, The Second Mother is a sharp commentary on the culture of emotional architecture in contemporary Brazil. Val is a domestic maid from northeast Brazil who has been living with her bourgeoisie employers in Sao Paulo for 13 years, estranged from her young daughter Jessica. Val has strong professional ethics as a domestic maid. She never interrupts when her employers are talking, always wears her uniform when she is waiting on them, always gets permission from her employers concerning everything about herself or anything that happens in her employers\' house, and above all, does not lay a finger on the tub of ice- cream in the freezer that is reserved for her employers\' son. These work ethics and rules that Val has kept for 13 years all fall apart when her smart and confident daughter Jessica comes to Sao Paolo to take the college entrance exam. To Jessica, Val and her employers are just replicas of the European bourgeoisie during Brazil\'s colonized period; they abide by ancient customs and rules that should be abolished, and her mother Val is a second-class citizen with a slave mentality. This film will ring truer when Val the domestic help in The Second Mother is compared with Stevens the butler in Kazuo ISHIGURO\'s novel The Remains of the Day, while thinking about the meaning behind the title \"Second Mother.\" [Sunah KIM]