How to Clean a House in 10 Easy Steps
Beatriz Valencia, a domestic worker in the U.S. and Carolina, her daughter-filmmaker, collaborate to create the fictional character of a writer. Together, mother and daughter capture the slippage between truth and lies, in a hybrid documentary that tells a story about immigration, labor, dreams and the power of fiction to spark emancipation.
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Carolina Gonzalez ValenciaDirector
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Carolina Gonzalez ValenciaWriter
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Carolina Gonzalez ValenciaProducer
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Brenda AVILA-HANNAProducer
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Gonzalo Escobar MoraEditor
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Juan Mejia BoteroExecutive ProducerIgualada, Death by a Thousand Cuts
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Project Type:Animation, Documentary, Feature
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Runtime:3 minutes 13 seconds
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Country of Origin:United States
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Country of Filming:United States
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Shooting Format:4K
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Aspect Ratio:16:9
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Film Color:Color
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First-time Filmmaker:No
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Student Project:No
Carolina’s films lie at the intersection of personal, social, and political narratives. She weaves multiple media–animation, video, film, performance, and writing–to create films that challenge social and historical representations of migration, otherness, diaspora, and labor. She has worked on projects in Colombia, Mexico, Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Lebanon, and the United States. Carolina’s work has been shown internationally at venues such as GAZE (San Francisco); International short films showcase (Jakarta, Indonesia); Full Frame Theater/International short films and videos (Durham, NC); Contra el Silencio Todas Las Voces (Mexico City); Cinemateca Distrital (Bogotá, Colombia); Gene Siskel Film Center (Chicago). Her films have been screened on public access TV on sites such as Can TV (Chicago) and Videonautas (Colombia). She is the recipient of a BAVC MediaMaker Fellowship, LEF Foundation Production Grant, the Lyn Blumenthal Scholarship (School of the Art Institute of Chicago), the Gelman Travel Fellowship (School of the Art Institute of Chicago), and the Programa Nacional de Estímulos (Colombian Ministry of Culture). She received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (Department of Film, Video, New Media, and Animation). Carolina is now an associate professor in the Department of Art and Visual Culture at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine.
I am a filmmaker who deploys autoethnography to understand how and where the personal, social and political collide. My film practice is informed by my own experiences as an immigrant living in the US. I investigate the rupture of continuities resulting from migration and diaspora. I transform “non-belonging” into a tool that decenters dominant narratives and generates alternative forms of storytelling. My films are new documents that challenge social and historical representations of migration, otherness, diaspora, and labor.
My work turns a variety of materials into archival documents of research, employing fragmentation, re-arrangement, dislocation, and fiction as strategies to create contradictions, ambiguity, and possibility. With the stories I seek to tell in my films, I am interested in combining genres–namely fiction/documentary/animation/musical–as a way to create dissonance and highlight contradictions. With this breaking apart, I offer new takes on initial understandings of a particular story and presenting new stories as part of a constellation of intricate complex universes.
Making How to Clean a House in 10 Easy Steps allows me to tell a story that, because of my personal connection to the topic and main characters, can be told from the inside out. Typically, films about domestics reproduce colonial legacies that deny subjects their full humanity: they are represented only as domestic workers, only as women that suffer, only as persons constrained by their circumstances.
I, on the other hand, utilize closeness, physical, emotional, familian, as a space of power, where we tell our stories instead of others telling them for us. In addition, making the film in a collaborative and intentionally improvisational way allows us to take creative risks to question “tradition,” push to challenge ourselves and invent creative alternatives to what has already been done. Ultimately, I aim to expand the way different marginalized communities are represented, creating works where the complexities of our lives are represented, and the creativity, beauty, healing, and resilience of our lives are celebrated.