Description:

Reproductive Systems: Gender, Power and Society
Block Cinema continues its year-long series of programs inspired by One Book One Northwestern’s 2018-2019 selection, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, with a selection of films that engage the theme of reproduction. Biological reproduction is at the center of The Handmaid’s Tale, but Atwood’s novel also reflects how systems of education, labor, media and justice function to reproduce social structures across generations. Programmed with the support of the Northwestern Women’s Center, Reproductive Systems brings together documentaries, narratives and experimental films that interrogate these complex structures of social and biological reproduction and their effects on women’s lives.

Ilo Ilo
(Anthony Chen, 2013, Singapore, DCP, 99 min.)
In Hokkien, English, Tagalog, and Mandarin with English subtitles
Winner of the Camera d’Or award for best first feature at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival, Anthony Chen’s engrossing and empathetic drama Ilo Ilo tackles the emotional and socioeconomic complexities of care work in the age of globalization. The story centers on Teresa, a Filipina domestic worker hired by a Singaporean family to look after problem child Jiale just before the Asian financial crisis of 1997. Drawing on his own experiences, Chen looks incisively at inequities of class, gender, and national identity, particularly as they manifest and reproduce themselves in family dynamics and in the delegation of domestic labor.