LEBANON / GERMANY

Amateurs, Stars and Extras or the Labor of Love, 2018.

Digital video, 24 minutes 26 seconds.

Amateurs, Stars and Extras or The Labor of Love looks at the invisible work of care through a mix of situations linked to household labour, in culturally diverse contexts. The video presents different groups of people discussing their working conditions: from the domestic workers' syndicate in Mexico City, to a migrant worker from Beirut. The footage straddles the blurred line between staging and behind the scenes conversations to observe the dark side of the pillar that sustains the capitalist economy: the devalued and underpaid domestic work, mainly performed by women. Amateurs, Stars and Extras or The Labor of Love is a layered film where the set of filmmaking becomes an open space for thinking and generating politics, leisure and resistance. What is work?

How can we resist it? In a continuous dialectic between work as representation and the representation of work and its exploitations, the film has an optimistic take on collectivities and collective political projects.