
Maid in Hong Kong
Hong Kong employs hundreds of thousands of foreign domestic workers, mostly women from the Philippines and Indonesia, who live in the households they clean and cook for. This film follows their fight over permanent residency: under Hong Kong law, most long-term foreign residents can apply for the right to stay after seven years, but domestic helpers are explicitly excluded no matter how long they have worked in the city. Interviewees describe being treated as second-class citizens, confined to live-in arrangements, and shut out of a status available to nearly everyone else who calls Hong Kong home. The film sits with the women themselves as they talk about the court challenges brought against the exclusion and what losing those cases has meant for their sense of belonging after years or decades of work. It is a narrow, specific look at one legal fight rather than a broad survey of migrant labor, and it treats the women as witnesses to their own case rather than as a policy abstraction.