It all started with a box of childhood drawings and a few poorly written diary entries from my primary school days. The Koo family is a family of four, but for a few years, there was a fifth member. Over the span a decade, three different women lived with us at three different points in time: Kartika, Thyda, and Mega. When I was ten, Mega flew home to Indonesia for a holiday and never returned. To say that I felt sad is an understatement. My parents never hired another helper after that. Now in my twenties, the drawings and writings of the fifth members are a distant memory from my childhood.

When I shuffle through my old primary school clothes, I am reminded of the days spent with Mega before she left. We sat in her bedroom and picked out clothes that didn’t fit me anymore. She was to take them home for her children. I wonder if they ever got to wear my clothes. Then, I realised that I grew up as part of an irony in each of their lives. I was deathly close to the helpers who raised me, so much so that we would watch cartoon shows together, and sometimes, I would watch them cry. While I had gained a companion, a caretaker, and a second mother, their children had lost theirs. And so, they cried because they missed home.

In recent years, people all around the world have become more interconnected than ever before. In fact, the world spent years maintaining friendships and relationships over calls while the COVID-19 pandemic was at an all-time high. Yet, during my short field research on this topic, I found that even this interconnectivity became an irony for such migrant domestic workers. Instead of just being a medium for connection, the phone also became a medium for longing. When the Internet is down, when their children are busy, when they do not answer the phone, it feels as if their children are so close, yet so far.

The irony is painful.

Daughter (Ndhuk) is a short film that explores the longings of a migrant mother who tries to connect with her daughter over the phone. At the same time, she cares for her employer’s child, who becomes a constant reminder of her own. This film magnifies the pains of migrant mothers who long to mother their children from afar. Through Daughter intend to encapsulate three things — memories, hopes, and dreams — a mother’s memories of her child, a fragile hope to reconnect with them, and dreams of their happiness.​