Home Stranger
Maria Samaia is a writer, director and producer from São Paulo, Brazil. With a BFA in Film and Television from the Savannah College of Art and Design, she explores her love for art through cinema. Her dream is to bring international visibility to Latin American stories, specifically Brazilian cinema.
Home Stranger challenges the conventional immigrant story by showing aspects of reverse culture shock. It brings the perspective of Laura, a Brazilian woman who spent many of her forming years abroad, coming back home and facing the challenges that come with it.
In making this film, my goal was to show young immigrants that their feeling of being unrooted is a shared experience. When I moved abroad for the first time, I thought I was the only person to ever feel like I didn’t belong anywhere anymore – like somehow, I had overgrown both locations. But in writing Home Stranger, I talked to many different people with similar experiences and created a type of community around it.
Additionally, the story also questions the standard Latin American family dynamics.