Lumapit Sa Akin, Paraiso (Come to Me, Paradise) (2016) is a science-fiction documentary that focuses on the lives of three Filipina domestic workers—Irish May Salinas, Lyra Ancheta Torbela, and Romylyn Presto Sampaga—who work and live in Hong Kong. The film explores how these women maintain connections with their families despite the physical distance. The film is narrated and predominantly seen from the perspective of ‘Paraiso’ a spectral mediary that embodies the emotional isolation and longing experienced by migrant workers. This disembodied voice, whose narration is heard from a drone’s POV hovering omnipotently above the Hong Kong landscape, explains her symbolic and practical function from the outset. She represents all displaced women, who have historically and ancestrally been disavowed of their place in society and whose strength enables them to gather resources and provide for their loved ones remotely. She is also a mediating technology in the most contemporary sense, and her presence works as a device to upload digital communications from the workers and transmit them across borders on their behalf. Part ghost, part server, Paraiso holds these women’s experiences and connections across time and space and simultaneously gives us a window into their world.

The documentary reveals how these workers transform the Central District of Hong Kong each Sunday into a space for community and solidarity, hacking the usually bustling financial area, by turning it into a site of radical care. This temporary transformation highlights the stark contrast between their weekday isolation, as they live and work in their employers’ homes and the brief moments of freedom and connection they enjoy during their Sundays off. It is also clear that it is only in their communion and collective power that Paraiso can pick up a strong enough signal to receive and send their weekly video content. The conflation of digital communications and spiritual practice reframes our understanding of technology. Community, ritual, prayer and solidarity are also collective technologies of communication. In an era when we might easily assume the benevolence of digital technologies, Lumapit Sa Akin, Paraiso invites us to consider the violence of separation, isolation and the conditions of marginalised and exploited workers. In a world shaped by globalization and economic migration, and the compromised nature of public space both on and offline, of which our communications platforms are not innocent, other technologies are not only possible but essential.