At your service

Yogyakarta, Indonesia, 2009. In a recruitment Centre, young women undergo training to become domestic workers. They learn how to use a microwave, how to take care of an infant and how to speak their future employers language. In order to make money to provide for their families, every month approximately 35000 Indonesian women get on a plane to work abroad. However, this documentary film shows how the dream for a brighter future sometimes turns into a nightmare: under brutal conditions, domestic workers are turned into servants without a voice.

Social Interest

Major sources of female domestic workers include the Philippines, Thailand and Indonesia. Poor families and husbands, relying on remittances, often insist on the women to do domestic work abroad. Many countries such as Taiwan, Singapore, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates import domestic workers from abroad, usually poorer countries, through recruitment agencies and brokers because their own citizens are no longer obliged or inclined to do domestic work.

About the project

The film At your Service is a part of the project To Serve. In this project, Jorge Leon (film) and Simone Aughterlony (theatre) have collaborated to integrate and stage the raw material of documented experience with a more performative material stemming from their research into the archetypical representation of the domestic. To Serve is be a piece of three parts.1: House without a Maid (an installation), 2: Deserve (a performance) and 3: Vous etes servis (this film). To Serve is shaped and presented in different venues according to the nature of the work proposed by various artists.