How To clean a House in Ten Easy Steps

How To Clean a House in 10 Easy Steps, follows our protagonist, Beatriz Valencia, an acclaimed writer originally from Colombia, and her over 20-year writing career. Mrs. Valencia has written 2 best-selling titles: How to Clean a House in 10 Easy Steps, and Solitude and Other Challenges, A Mother Working Overseas. This film captures Valencia’s writing process and her lived experience, documenting her years as a working mother to her eventual writing career.

But what is fact and what is fiction? In How To Clean a House in 10 Easy Steps we witness the manipulation of facts and fiction as mother and daughter create ways to heal, celebrate and emancipate their own stories. Fact: In March 1998, Mrs. Valencia, my mother, left our home in Medellin, Colombia, and immigrated to the United States, where she would support our family for the next 20 years as a domestic worker. Fiction: My mother is not an acclaimed author. This persona is, in fact, a made-up character my mother created when I turned the camera on her to learn about her immigration story and her life as a domestic worker.