No Day Off
Eric Khoo

“No Day Off charts four years in the life of Siti, a young woman who leaves her husband and baby boy in a remote village in Sulawesi to work as a maid in Singapore. The narrative unfolds through her perspective and captures her trials and tribulations as she works for three different families in Singapore.”

This should be compulsory viewing for all prospective maid-owners (such a possessive term!). You hire a gardener, you go to the doctor’s, but you own a maid, with all the unpleasant connotations of slavery that implies. Of human bondage huh? The scary thing is that this view of maids isn’t far off the mark for some people. How else to explain the abuses, physical, verbal and mental, that take place?
These are people driven by economic necessity to seek a better life for their families and themselves by working overseas. Didn’t our ancestors do the same? Where is our sense of empathy? If not basic human courtesy?
The movie is told from Siti’s point of view and we don’t see the faces of the different families. All the better, says co-writer Wong Kim Hoh, for the audience to ask whether I’m the bastard up there on the screen.