Ilo Ilo (2013) on Netflix
In Singapore during the 1997 financial crisis, the Lim family hires Teresa, a maid from Iloilo, to care for their ten-year-old son, Jiale. The boy, a troublemaker, resents her at first.
- Netflix3.4/5
- IMDb7.2/105,240 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes100%
Trailer
Plot summary
Singapore, 1997. Teck sells glass and his pregnant wife, Hwee Leng, works as a secretary at a shipping company that is cutting staff, while their ten-year-old son, Jiale, is a handful at home and at school. The couple hire Teresa, a Filipino woman who has left her infant son behind in Iloilo to work as a live-in maid. Jiale avoids her and does not want her fetching him from school. When Teck loses his sales job, he keeps it from Hwee Leng and takes work as a security guard at an egg farm, losing money on stocks on the side. Teresa, meanwhile, secretly styles hair at Lucky Plaza. As she and Jiale slowly warm to each other, Hwee Leng feels the boy slipping away from her.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Ilo Ilo (2013)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The rooftop scene in which Jiale shows Terry a city skyline, used for the film poster, was shot on a Housing and Development Board block at Teban Gardens without permission, after the town council and government agencies refused rooftop filming and the crew found access by accident.
SPOILER
Yeo Yann Yann's real pregnancy forced Anthony Chen to rewrite the script in December 2011, and he filmed the caesarean delivery of her daughter for the concluding scene because the hospital barred relatives from the operating room.- Ilo Ilo won the Caméra d'Or at Cannes, becoming the first Singaporean feature film ever to receive an award at the festival.
- Angeli Bayani won the role of the maid Terry as the last of 30 to 40 women who auditioned in a cheap hotel room, arriving straight from a theatre show.
- Casting Jiale took ten months; Koh Jia Ler was one of 2,000 child auditionees from at least 20 schools, was rejected at a screening, and got the part after discreetly asking a casting assistant.
- Anthony Chen found the closing-credits song, "Kahapon at Pag-ibig" by Asin, by chance while searching iTunes, and singer Lolita Carbon asked for a DVD copy of the film when the production requested the rights.
- Chen based the film on his own family's Filipino maid, "Aunt Terry", who worked for them from 1988, when he was four, until 1997, when he was twelve.
- After the Caméra d'Or win, Philippine media agencies launched a hunt for the maid Anthony Chen had grown up with, whom he knew only by a first name and two photographs; she was found two weeks later.
