Immigrant song

>>A refugee family struggles through
life in the often devastating but
never earnest Family Motel

by MATTHEW HAYS

With her latest feature, Montreal filmmaker Helene Klodawsky finds rich terrain in the dilemmas facing poor immigrants in Canada. In Family Motel, she sensibly sets the stress and strain of her story in the nation’s capital.

Here, in prim, proper, button-down Ottawa, a hard-working refugee from Somalia learns early in the film that, due to one missed payment, she’s being evicted from her digs. With two daughters in tow, this is the beginning of a series of heart-wrenching turns for the family, forced into the motel of the film’s title. It’s no safe haven—rather, the new shelter emerges as a bit of a nightmare, removed from the girls’ schools and populated with petty criminals and thugs.

Klodawsky straddles one heckuva high-wire act with Family Motel; she’s managed to look back at some of the very best documentary-drama hybrids from the NFB’s storied past, while looking forward, incorporating our culture’s newer baggage involving reality TV and the new face of poverty. It’s often devastating while never earnest, and Family Motel manages to show us this part of immigrant life without ever seeming preachy or stolid.

What’s perhaps most striking is the sheer lack of options readily available for our protagonist, as she sweats through two jobs and the demands of two daughters who are at delicate ages (pubescent and barely pre-pubescent).

Cinematographer German Gutierrez shoots Family Motel in an intimate style that draws us into unblinking close-ups of these three lives. And Klodawsky takes the risk of casting three non-actors in the leads, Nargis, an actual case coordinator for the poor in Ottawa, and her two daughters, Asha and Sagal Jibril, as the rootless family. It pays off: Family Motel boasts a style that is naturalistic and organic, making the trio’s plight all the more stirring.

Adding to Motel’s overall impact is its closure. Films like these often demand some kind of concrete resolution—either rosy or tragic—letting us know the fate of the afflicted. But Klodawsky is too smart to offer such a manicured finale. Family Motel reflects the ongoing struggle that comes from a cycle of poverty. With neither exploitation nor bombast, Klodawsky has shown us life.

Baby Mama opens this
Friday, April 25

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