Demand Film, the Australian-based “event cinema” film distributor who successfully brought the documentary feature “Mamil” to screens throughout Canada in 2017, will present the Canadian premiere of documentary feature “Sunday Beauty Queen” at 20 cinemas throughout Canada on Monday, May 14. All seating for the one-night national screening must be reserved in advance, online at https://ca.demand.film/sunday-beauty-queen.
Directed by Baby Ruth Villarama and shot over the period of four years, “Sunday Beauty Queen” follows a particular, yet universal, tale of OFWs (Overseas Filipino Workers), Filipino maids and domestic helpers who compete to become Hong Kong’s beauty queens on their one day of freedom each week, while also revealing their workaday lives lived with their employers. They work long hours for near-slave wages in order to support families living back in the Philippines. “Sunday Beauty Queen” features the real stories of five women among the thousands of OFWs (Overseas Filipino Workers) in Hong Kong working as domestic helpers. Each Sunday, these Filipino maids transform themselves into dazzling beauty queens, entertaining their fellow Filipinos and raising funds for distressed OFWs in need of help.
“’Sunday Beauty Queen’ is not just an OFW story,” says director Baby Ruth Villarama. “It’s the story of every Filipino, struggling to make a living and yet finding light and hope in any way they can.”
“Sunday Beauty Queen” has been featured at numerous international film festivals, including the Metro Manila Film Festival 2016, where it was named Best Picture; CinemaAsia Film Festival 2017, where it won the Audience Choice Award for Best Documentary, the Busan International Film Festival, HotDocs 2017 and Shanghai International Film Festival 2017, among others. Variety hailed the film as “an engaging documentary on Filipina overseas workers’ self-empowerment through beauty pageants.”
Demand Film has agreements in place with both major movie theatre chains as well as independent screens, whereby Demand Film essentially co-ops traditionally low attendance nights, and crowd-sources audiences to those cinemas with unique offerings of cinema-worthy films.
Following is a complete list of cinemas where “Sunday Beauty Queen” will screen on Monday, May 14 at Cineplex esplanade in North Vancouver, Cineplex Strawberry Hill in Surrey and Cineplex Park Theatre in Vancouver. All showings are at 7:00 pm, local time, with the exception of Calgary, where the film will screen at 8:00 pm local time.
(From website https://ca.demand.film/sunday-beauty-queen/)