‘Invisible’ (2024): MMB Film Screening and Panel Discussion

UK premier of a documentary short about the challenges faced by domestic workers in Colombia commuting on public transport.

‘Invisible’ (30 mins).

A documentary short by Valentina Montoya Robledo and Daniel Gómez Restrepo.

(Spanish, with English subtitles).

Register to attend the screening here.

Two domestic workers, Reinalda in Medellín and Belén in Bogotá, explain the challenges they face when travelling on public transport day after day from their own neighbourhoods to the communities where they work. Their long, costly and overcrowded journeys are invisible to their employers and to those that plan the public transport networks. Despite everything, they carry on with characteristic tenacity. Each day they wake up and keep a part of Colombian society going by undertaking a job that is undervalued and underpaid. They fight for a better life – for themselves, for their communities and above all for their children and grandchildren and their co-workers.

‘Invisible’ refers to something that is present but not seen.

In Colombia, the contribution of domestic workers has long been invisible, but today they are speaking out. This documentary film is part of the project ‘Invisible Commutes’ that seeks to make domestic workers’ long, and often violent, commutes more visible and to campaign for public transport that takes their needs into account.

Panel discussion

Following the screening MMB Director Bridget Anderson will chair a discussion about the film and the issues it raises such as domestic workers’ representation, campaigns to improve their rights, and the challenges they face both commuting and migrating for work. The panel will include the film’s director, Valentina Montoya Robledo (University of Oxford), Rachel Randall (Queen Mary University of London) and Maud Perrier (University of Bristol).

Valentina Montoya Robledo is a lawyer, filmmaker and political scientist. She began researching domestic workers’ commutes on public transport in Bogotá, Medellín and São Paulo in 2014 as part of her doctoral thesis. As a lawyer she has worked as a close collaborator of the Afro-Colombian Union of Domestic Workers and as an Assistant Professor in the Law Department at the University of Los Andes. She is currently a Senior Researcher in Gender and Mobility at the Transport Studies Unit, University of Oxford.

Rachel Randall is Reader in Latin American Studies at Queen Mary University of London and co-investigator of ‘Invisible’. Her new book, Paid to Care (University of Texas Press, 2024), examines the depiction of paid domestic workers in Latin American culture since the 1980s and her current research project on ‘Affective and Immaterial Labour in Latin(x) American Culture’ looks at representations of wet-nursing, migrant domestic work and sex work from the late 19th century.

Maud Perrier is Senior Lecturer in the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol. Her research includes care workers’ organising, which she explores in her recent book Childcare Struggles, Maternal Workers and Social Reproduction (BUP 2022). She is concerned with advancing feminist debates around childcare, motherhood and social reproduction.

The event is organised as part of the MMB Research Challenge, Representation, Belonging, Futures, and the MMB Film Group, both co-ordinated by Nariman Massoumi.

The screening will take place in the Film and Television Department Cinema. Places are limited. Please register to attend the screening here.