Carolina Gonzalez Valencia’s How to Clean a House in Ten Easy Steps is a hybrid-documentary that takes an amazing true story of a domestic worker’s journey in the USA and fuses it with fiction, animation, dance, and dream-like sequences to portray a story of hard work and redemption, as well as the quest for the ever-elusive American dream.
Beatriz Valencia (the filmmaker’s mother) came to the US as a young labourer with wide eyes and the promise that hard work would equal opportunity and comfort in the land of milk and honey. Of course, that work can take years, and it separates fractured families waiting for their loved ones to be reunited and included on the boat ride over to a better life.
But as Carolina explores her mother’s past and choices, by re-casting her mother as the bestselling author of her autobiographical adventure from rages to riches, there is a bonding and exploration which takes shape as a life’s work and walk reforms as the simple steps it takes to get all the work complete and on time.
Separating the reality the director remembers, and the woman and the ecosphere she wishes to know more about, the narrative, dissected into a literal 10-step cleaning method: start a load of laundry to multitask while you clean, collect all trash from every room and replace bags, gather misplaced items into baskets to return them to their proper rooms. All these rudimentary tasks made up Beatriz Valencia’s day-to-day ritual. But for this movie, those once steps, once laborious, are now crafted into chapters that stretch and strip away at the elements of a person and an existence that defied the odds and won, with grit and determination, a place at the table.
“…a Colombian-born domestic worker… and the generation that has and will prosper…”
But the steps of the story, blending the fictional and the factual, are more about bridging the understanding between generations. The harsh realities that were once commonplace are now being re-examined. The paths chosen for the benefit of the one don’t always benefit the many, and the decisions parents make for the possible betterment of their future, while not obvious to the children, can have resounding implications. Beatriz’s road may have paving fashioned out of misfortune and misunderstanding, but the struggle is the glory, and with her daughter’s creative dissection, they make a bond all the more concrete.
How to Clean a House in Ten Easy Steps also reconnoiters the intersection of immigration, labor, motherhood, and sacrifice. Many are called, but few go all the way. Many come to work like demons for a promise that is increasingly unlikely to pay dividends. So, for this tale of a Colombian-born domestic worker, her comrades in the cleaning trade, and the generation that has and will prosper from the long-suffering and silent sweating of their resilient mothers in the land of liberty and justice for all, this picture stands as a testament to heart, soul, and spirit.
With playful straying from convention, How to Clean a House in Ten Easy Steps takes the biographical and the fantastical and smashes them together to make a phantasmagorical microcosm of an epic life quest for progress and understanding.
"…takes the biographical and the fantastical and smashes them together"
