“Enjoy Your Stay,” the Berlin Film Festival drama from “Goliath” director Dominik Locher and Filipino filmmaker Honeylyn Joy Alipio, has been acquired by Indonesian distributor Falcon and has its Indonesian premiere at Jakarta World Cinema.
The film follows Luz, an undocumented Filipina cleaner at a Swiss luxury ski resort.
“We heard about [stories of] Indonesian people working in nail salons in Swiss cities during our research. That’s even the worst situation in some cases, and we were really hoping that this movie could also speak for Indonesian people,” Locher says.
Luz, played by Mercedes Cabral, may lose custody of her children to her husband back home. To prevent that, she works extra hard and, lured by the legal document and higher pay promised by a Swiss gangmaster, becomes a labor trafficker herself. The reality turns out to be a pipe dream. Locher calls the world it exposes “the dirty side of the Swiss postcard.”
Alexis Manenti also stars. Close Up Films produced the film, with JBA Production co-producing and Be For Films handling sales.
Locher and Alipio, who co-wrote and co-directed the film, first met at the Busan International Film Festival. When Locher later set out to tell a story about “people who live in the shadow of Switzerland,” he reached out to Alipio, who agreed to collaborate.
Alipio trained under Filipino artist Armando “Bing” Lao and works with his “found story” approach, in which filmmakers merge real-life cases into fiction. The pair researched on site at Swiss luxury resorts, talking to undocumented workers from countries including Serbia, Sri Lanka and the Philippines.
Alipio has run into the assumption herself: one of Locher’s neighbors once asked if she was his cleaner. Locher corrected the neighbor – she was his colleague.
“As a Filipina, I cannot help but feel sadness and shame. I do not want the Filipinas to be portrayed as cleaners, but that is our reality. It was a hard pill to swallow,” Alipio tells Variety.
She still finds the partnership beautiful, because she and Locher represent the two countries in the story and, together, amplify the voices within it.
It was Alipio, Locher says, who insisted from the start that Luz not be reduced to a victim because she’s undocumented, “because she must be a very ambitious woman. Otherwise she would never be in Switzerland.”
That ambition tests her loyalty to her Filipino colleagues, who support each other like sisters.
After its Berlin world premiere in February, “Enjoy Your Stay” had its Asian premiere at the Cinemalaya Philippine Independent Film Festival, where the filmmakers held a panel with an organization that supports undocumented workers. In Switzerland, where the film will screen publicly on Nov. 22, Locher and Alipio organized a special screening exclusively for undocumented workers. Screenings were fully booked and drew rave reviews from Filipino viewers, many of whom said the film captured their reality.
“We hoped that [it] would be a movie [people] enjoy watching, but also a movie that stirs up discussions on how to treat one another,” Locher says. Alipio, he adds, once said she hopes that in 50 years, the story the film tells will no longer happen in real life.
The pair’s next project, “Partner Zone,” which Variety first reported in February, follows a Swiss ESG (environmental, social and governance) auditor to the Philippines to examine a gold mine. Switzerland refines 50%-70% of the world’s annual gold supply.
“Dom and I have already established a working dynamic. We have an ambition to create more films dedicated to the world’s marginalized people,” Alipio says.
The duo are still at the research stage and plan to start scripting in 2027, with 90% of the shoot set for the Philippines and the rest in Geneva.