Oscar Molina - Filmmaker
2016-2017

“Mi Casa My Home,” is a documentary project that explores the notion of home when is affected by migration between countries with different opportunities of access to economical and social conditions. It centers its attention on stories of migrants who, from within their host country and financed by their remittances, construct their dream homes in their country of origin. Many of these houses stand incomplete, some derelict, and many stand uninhabited for years, large-scale containers of the deferred dream of returning and a visual testament to an illusory economic viability.

 “Mi Casa My Home” asks: What is the metaphoric significance of these edifices? How does one’s definition of “home” or sense of self change throughout the migration experience? In what ways do the houses respond to or withstand changing political and economic conditions? And given these ongoing conditions of flux, is it ever possible for emigres to fulfill the dream of returning?

“Mi Casa My Home” aims to capture the sheer breadth of this phenomenon with two documentaries, “Mama Icha’s House” and “Absentees’ House”; and through an interactive platform as a tool for reflection, calling attention and poetic translation of this global phenomenon of remittance houses.

Mi Casa My Home