Money and Honey depicts the lives of Filipina caregivers who look after the elderly in a nursing home in Taiwan. Being away from their loved ones, the migrant workers, as well as the elderly suffer from homesickness. In the flow of life, stories of joy and sorrow take place.
Baby is around forty years old with two young boys.
Her husband is an odd-jobman. Baby is a high-school graduate, and worked in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait as a housemaid. She returned to the Philippines when the Iran-Iraq War broke out. She worked in Taiwan for 6 years. Baby is very cheery and is good at using body language to express herself. She is one of the main characters of this film.
Jasmine LEE Ching-hui is currently an assistant professor of the Department of Visual Communication Design at Dayeh University. She has been an independent filmmaker since 1996, when her maternal grandparents moved into a nursing home. Based on her own experiences of care-giving and stories from the nursing home, she created a tetralogy of films entitled “The Realm of Womanhood,” including Where Is My Home (1999), The Ballads of Grandmothers (2003), which won the First Prize in the International Women's Film Festival in Seoul and the Best Individual Achievement Award in the Taipei Film Festival. City of Memories (2007), which won the Best Documentary at the South Taiwan Film Festival, and was selected for competition in the Taiwan International Documentary Film Festival. Money and Honey (2011), which enters documentary competition in the BIFF Wide Angle Section this year.
Money and Honey is sponsored by the Asian Cinema Fund-Asian Network of documentary PUFS Fund, BUSAN International Film Festival. The selection cause is, “The project covers an often overlooked social topic in today’s society. Through intimate personal filming over many years, we are naturally drawn to the characters and to empathize with them.”
With the advance of globalization, human migration is expanding at a phenomenal rate. Migrant workers are an important and integral element of modern Asian society. The Philippines is the world’s second largest exporter of labour, with almost ten million Filipinos, or one-tenth of the country’s total population, working abroad. A key factor in this phenomenon is the aging society and the need for care. In Taiwan, the population is aging faster than any other nation on earth. The film Money and Honey brings together these two conditions to document the lives of both Taiwanese elders and their Filipino carers.
