SYNOPSIS
After 33 years as a Colombian émigré in the United States, 93-year-old Maria Dionisia Navarro (Mama Icha) wants to go home. In the land of her birth, in a small town burrowed into the Magdalena River Valley, a house awaits her, a house she funded piece by piece with money she earned in the States. But her long-imagined homecoming is no easy return. This is a story of reverse migration; it is a story about the dream to return home, and it is a story that asks how the sense of home is transformed through migration. It is a story of a mother, a dispersed family, a longing, a striving for agency, for rootedness.


Feature-length documentary
Running time: 83 mins.
Language: Spanish with English subtitles
Stage: Finishing postproduction
TEASER THE HOUSE OF MAMA ICHA

Production Company: Actor Inmaterial

In Coproduction with: La Tina Sonido,Three Spokes Productions / Aggie Ebrahimi, Brenda I. Steinecke Soto  

With the kind support of:
Participation in:
"The House of Mama Icha" is part of “Mi Casa My Home,” a documentary trasmedia trilogy by Colombian director Oscar Molina 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, “The House of Mama Icha” 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.