Overview
Genre: Documentary
Running Time: 85 minutes (director’s cut);  82 minutes (POV cut)
Lenguage: Spanish (with English subtitles).
Format: HD
Writer, Director, Cinematographer &
Assistant Editor: Oscar Molina
Producers: Brenda I. Steinecke Soto
& Oscar Molina
Co-Producers: Aggie Ebrahimi Bazaz,
Jorge Martín Molina Escobar & La Tina Sonido
- Executive Producers for POV: Justine Nagen & Chris White
- Producing Company:  Actor Inmaterial Producciones
- Email: [email protected]
Distribution (Theatrical for Colombia):
Cine Colombia
Distribution (Educational Market):
Actor Inmaterial Producciones
Production Countries:
Colombia & United States
Year of completion: 2020
La casa de Mama Icha
Official Trailer

Contact
Email: [email protected]
Phone: Oscar Molina + 57 312 2269113
Phone: Brenda I. Steinecke Soto
+ 57 305 2252522
Website: www.micasamyhomefilm.com
Selection
American Documentary | POV Official Selection 2021 season 34 - PBS, USA
Official Selection, Global Migration Film Festival. Southamerica Edition, 2023
Official Selection FIDBA, Argentina 2022
Opening film to HAY Festival in Jericó 2021
Penn Live Arts, University of Pennsylvania 2022
Official Selection Grand Rapids Film Festival, 2022
Official Selection Watsonville Film festival 2022
Official Selection Slamdance Miami 2021
Official Selection Montes de María Audiovisual Festival, COL 2021
Official Selection Marinilla International Film Festival, COL 2021
Official Selection City of Itagüí International Film Festival, COL 2021
Official Selection North Carolina Latino Film Festival, USA 2021
Official Selection and Honorable Mention Philadelphia Latino Film Festival, USA 2021
Official Selection Cartagena International Film Festival, COL 2020 and 2021

Theatrical release
In Colombia: September 2nd, 2021.

Aknowledgments
•Five nominations for the Macondo Awwards: Best Documentary, Best Script, Best Montage, Best Sound & Best VFX.
•Preselction Platino Awards in the Categories Best Documentary & Cinema on Education and Values
•Honorable Mention, Philadelphia Latino Film Festival
•ChileDoc, CONECTA con el impacto, Santiago de Chile, 2019
•Special Mention, BAM Screenings, Bogotá Audiovisual Market, Bogotá, Colombia, 2019
•Selection at Residencias Walden, Medellín, Colombia, 2018
•Postproduction Grant by Comisión Fílmica de Medellín, Colombia, 2017
•Artist Residency, Fundación Espacio Arte, Medellín, Colombia, 2017
•Postproduction Grant by Centro Ático – Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Colombia, 2016
•Selection at DocuLab.8, Festival Internacional de Cine de Guadalajara, México, 2016
•Selection at Documentary Workshop, Festival Internacional de Cine de Cartagena, Colombia, 2016
•Selection at Spotlight on Documentaries - Independent Film Program Week, IFP, New York, United States, 2015
•Selection at development workshop, DocsBarcelona+Medellín, Colombia, 2014
•Production Grant for a short documentary by the Colombian Film Fund, FDC-Proimágenes, Colombia, 2014
Produced in assoiation with American Documentary | POV
Short Synopsis
93-year-old Mama Icha wants to return home. Even now after 33 years of living in the US, she dreams of spending her last days in Mompox, Colombia, in the house she patiently built there with money she sent. Her life in the US has been comfortable, but an ancestral desire to return to the land of origin pushes her. Upon her arrival, the idyllic home she imagined confronts the disrepair created by years of separation and economic inequality.
Long Synopsis
Mama Icha feels the end of her life close and only thinks of one thing: returning to her homeland, Colombia. Decades ago, she had immigrated to the United States to help her daughter with the care of the grandchildren. She dreams of the Magdalena River in the sunset, being surrounded by her family and neighbors in the patio of the house she built during the years of absence with the money she sent from abroad. But the idyllic world of her memories is confronted with deteriorated family relationships and the repercutions of economic inequality. “The House of Mama Icha” is an observational documentary that portraits the heroic return of 93-year-old Maria Donisia Navarro to Colombia. It is a film that explores the legacies of migration and immerses us in the heartbreaking reality of power struggles in families, when seniors become dependent on the care of others.
 
Mama Icha embodies the dream of many migrants to spend their last days in the houses that they built in their place of origin with remittances. "The House of Mama Icha" is part of "Mi Casa My Home", a transmedia documentary trilogy that reflects on the meaning of 'home' when it is crossed by the experience of migration.
Director's Statement
Oscar Molina - Writer, Diretor, Producer, Cinemtographer & Assistant Editor
"La casa de Mama Icha" is a declaration of love to one's land. In a time of great displacements, of fragmentation of the bonds of belongingness, of preponderance of certain hegemonic cultural values, Mama Icha with her story resignifies the relevance that has the sense of rootedness. She, heroically and with the strength of an ancestral thought, faces great obstacles to meet the goal of living her last days and die in the land of origin. "La casa de Mama Icha" also mirrors family conflicts and how confronting they are, specially when the elders approach the end of their days. Altogether, this story brings us to think about the multiple meanings of the experience of “home”.
Nearly twenty years ago, I faced the realization that the land of my birth, Colombia, could not sustain my career. And so, I left. At several moments in my life, I have lived, worked, and studied in different countries. In each new place, I would inevitably meet a compatriot who had arrived at a similar realization. In a country so resplendent in natural and cultural resources, I wondered, why are people compelled to leave?
When Icha was boarding her final flight to Colombia, I was the only person among her friends and family that could join her. Together, we made the return trip home. And together, we would discover the chasm between the homeland we’d imagined and the one that we found. My travels back to Colombia with Icha were also my travels back to Colombia.
I am committed to exposing the socioeconomic factors underlying Icha’s journey. “La Casa de Mama Icha" is part of a trilogy of projects related to remittance homes around the world. My next feature, "Absentee’s House" (currently in post-production) will take us into remittance homes across the Mexican countryside, many of which are left empty for years. We are also in research and development for a web-based documentary, Mi Casa My Home, in which we will archive users’ stories of their remittance homes alongside analytical frameworks for understanding this phenomenon as part of a larger story of global capital and its displacements.
I first met Mama Icha and the Ortiz family in 2012 as Icha’s urgency to return home was escalating, and so too, my own. I began to document Icha’s journey with a vérité approach. But in my long, quiet observations, I saw something of myself. I saw in this proud, resilient mother, the hearts of countless others like myself who carry dreams of return.

What is home after migration?
Mi Casa My Home is a transmedia documentary trilogy that invites us to think about the meanings of home in the current circumstances of migration and imbalance in the opportunities for reaching prosperity. This trilogy focuses on stories of migrants who, from their host countries and financed with remittances, build the houses they have always dreamed of in their countries of origin. Over time, many migrants, after investing years of savings and with a great transnational effort, repeatedly postpone their return. Many of the houses remain incomplete, others are abandoned or remain uninhabited for years: large-scale containers of that deferred dream of returning to the land of origin and a visual testimony of an illusory economic viability.
 
Mi Casa My Home seeks to capture the enormous breadth of this phenomenon in the world through two feature-length documentaries, La Casa de Mama Icha (in distribution) and La Casa de los ausentes (in postproduction); and through an interactive web platform (in research & development) to connect and reflect on the stories of families living with a divided sense of home.
 
Mi Casa My Home asks: What is the meaning of these buildings? How is the very definition of "home" altered by the experience of migration? How do these houses respond to or bear witness to the different political and economic conditions between countries? How do these remittance houses become part of the global market while their owners cannot move freely? Is it ever possible for a migrant to fulfill the dream of returning home?

Stills
High resolution film stills to download (right-click on mouse)
Imagen
Official Poster
Imagen
La casa de Mama Icha
Imagen
Writer, Director, Producer, Cinematographer & Assistant Editor Oscar Molina
Videos
Crew Bios
Reviews
“I am grateful to Oscar Molina for this work that captures the reality and beauty of my grandmother's life and her connection to her land and her home. I honor my grandmother in my every action and carry her strength with me. This film is a piece of her heart that I can now share with others, so that we can all heal and appreciate the land we came from.”
Michelle Ángela Ortiz, Mama Icha’s Granddaughter, Latina Artist and Activist
https://www.michelleangela.com
How do you make nostalgia visible? Or a house you only dream about? It took Óscar Molina a long time in the editing room to answer those questions. But ultimately he did so in the opening sequence of La Casa de Mama Icha, his documentary about a migrant grandmother’s homecoming.
Patricia Thomson
International Documentary Association's (IDA) Magazine
“Shot with extraordinary intimacy, this narrative documentary is not only a tale told through a powerful set of portraits of complex loving characters, it also is a rarely seen window into the thinking and decisions of immigrant families in the US. It is new to see/hear stories of immigrant families where decisions and actions are presented with the complexity and agency of those who have made the journey. This is not a cold sociological study, but the story of a warm complex family.”
Louis J. Messiah, Filmmaker and Director, Scribe Video Center
“I was very excited after seeing the movie. What I liked most were the gestures of humanity. The unspoken things, the hugs, the ways of looking. Mama Icha sticks in your head. She's a wonderful heroine.“
Víctor Gaviria, Colombian Film Director
“Mama Icha does not want to return to Colombia because of the complicated situation in the country where she is, but because of an intuitive urgency, as if every day that passes takes her further away from the possibility of dying in her homeland. That is why, when Mama Icha finally arrives in Mompox, the spectator already knows that her real journey has just begun.”
Estefanía Palacios Araújo, Semana Magazine
https://bit.ly/2OsKhwf
“La casa de Mama Icha has the best of what is usually attributed to a documentary film and what is expected of a fiction film.”
Pedro Adrián Zuluaga, Crítico de cine colombiano
Diario Criterio
“The discomfort of La casa de Mamá Icha does not lie in Molina's invisible camera or in his curious voice that interacts a couple of times with the protagonists, but in the words of a nonagenarian whose feet, although hanging from a rocking chair, become portentous roots: 'One never loses the love of the earth'. 'The earth is sacred'".
Ana Cristina Restrepo, Periodista colombiana
El Espectador
“La casa de mamá Icha belongs to a special category of quality cinema and it is that of the films that one loves because one finds in their approaches something that connects with deep fibers of the human being.”
Orlando Mora, Crítico de cine colombiano
Palabras de Cine
"More than a reflection, La casa de Mama Icha is an intense emotional experience that causes deep sadness, as well as anger, frustration and anguish in the viewer."
André Didyme-Dome
Revista Rolling Stone
"A lucid cinema that today more than ever we should all support as we understand it as an act of resistance of great purity, and the best way is to take the time to talk with the protagonist of this film, which we guarantee, has many, many things to tell you, kind reader".
Juan Guillermo Romero
El Colectivo. Periodismo para la utiopia.
"Now, perhaps Mama Icha knew very well that she was being recorded at that moment and how she was being recorded, and it would be very naive to suppose that she was not aware that she was living an exaltation of her own epic. But what Molina's work teaches us in this tremendous documentary, what his expert camera and his alert voice made of experience, teach us above all, is that what is proper to life, the humility or truth of life, is the poetic exaltation of its barbarism."
Santiago Andrés Gómez Sánchez
Press & Media Coverage
Selection
Por Andrés Murillo Por Juli César Guzman Por Eduardo Arias Villa Paper written by Oscar Molina & Brenda I. Steineke Soto for the Research Groupe Homing - The Home Migration Nexus
Social Media
Website
www.micasamyhomefilm.com
Email
[email protected]
FB, IG & TW:
@CasaDeMamaIcha