Dea Screening and Discussion with Director Alberto Gerosa

The movie "Dea" (2021) is about the lives of foreign female domestic helpers who work in Hong Kong. They are embroiled in the complex politics of race and gender of the city. Through telling their migrant stories, this screening sheds light on the unspoken demographic that very much constitutes Hong Kong's everyday life. The screening is followed by a discussion and Q&A with director Dr. Alberto Gerosa, moderated by Prof. Elizabeth Wijaya. Sponsorship by Istituto Italiano di Cultura, Toronto.

"Dea" probes the put-upon lives of foreign domestic helpers, mostly hailing from Indonesia or The Philippines, who enable Hong Kong's middle classes to function as double income families and facilitate the territory's hard-charging, long-hours work culture. And yet foreign domestic helpers endure often demeaning living standards, sleeping in their employer's smallest rooms, precarious employment conditions, sexual violence, and widespread ridicule for their 'colorful' group activities in public places on their Sunday rest days. The film is a product of a workshop of for women in Hong Kong and neighboring Macau, who had experienced employer abuse in the course of their work. For the sake of legal distance and storytelling fluency, "Dea" was made, not as a documentary, but as a fiction film that dramatizes real events. —Chris McCulloch/ IMDB

Alberto Gerosa is an Italian anthropologist working with film and performance. He holds a BA in Performing Arts and Social Sciences, a joint master of research in Social and Cultural Anthropology from Ljubljana and Stockholm Universities, and a PhD in Cultural and Religious Studies from Chinese University of Hong Kong. He taught documentary filmmaking at Antwerp University between 2012 and 2014. In 2015-2019 he was a visiting scholar at the Image Anthropology LAB, University of Tokyo, working with visual anthropologist Tadashi Yanai. In 2019-2021, he was assistant professor at Hong Kong Baptist University and Beijing Normal University UIC. He is currently an adjunct professor in visual anthropology and ethnographic film at CUHK.

Elizabeth Wijaya works at the intersection of cinema, philosophy, and area studies. She is especially interested in the material and symbolic entanglements between East Asia and Southeast Asia cinema. Her work emphasizes a multimethodological approach, which is attentive to media forms, ethnographic detail, material realities, archival practices, international networks, and interdisciplinary modes of theorization. She received her PhD from the Department of Comparative Literature at Cornell University, where she was affiliated with the East and Southeast Asian Programs. For 2018–2019, she was a President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Minnesota (Twin Cities). She received the Connaught New Researcher Award in 2020. For 2020-2021, she is the convenor of “Mediating Race, Reimagining Geopolitics,” JHI-UTM Seminar. She is building an online-accessible collection of Asian short films with UTM library. She is also the co-founder of E&W Films. She is an Associate Producer of Taste (2021) directed by Lê Bảo, which received the Special Jury Award of the Encounters Competition at the 71st Berlinale Film Festival.

The Italian Cultural Institute (Istituto Italiano di Cultura), Cultural Section of the Consulate General of Italy in Toronto, is a centre for cultural and academic activities, a school of Italian language and civilization, a source of information about contemporary Italy, as well as a venue for art exhibitions, lectures, films, and video screenings.

The Richard Charles Lee Canada-Hong Kong Library at the University of Toronto features a unique research collection on Canada-Hong Kong studies. It provides resources and space to accommodate the continuous growth of research interest in Hong Kong, and its relation to Canada and other regions in the world.