In Holy Emy, two young adult Filipino immigrant sisters are left to fend for themselves in Athens, Greece as they try to move on with their lives after their mother left them to go back to the Philippines. Teresa is pregnant with a Greek sailor’s child. Emy also has a secret: she sheds tears of blood and can heal people, a gift that the sisters try to hide, wary of being exploited. The film tackles the sisters’ codependent lives and how they subsequently have to forge their own paths.
The movie is directed by Araceli Lemos from a screenplay that she and Guilia Caruso wrote. It is nominated for the 2023 Independent Spirit John Cassavetes Award and also earned a Someone to Watch nod for Lemos.
Lemos, who is Greek, explained why she chose to make her first feature centered on Filipino characters. It all started when she passed a local church and heard a group singing hymns.
“In Greece, there hasn’t been a film about them even though there’s a big Filipino community, especially since the ‘80s. I was always curious. I was writing at the time the story about two sisters, they were having a secret. The idea of the healing hadn’t come up until I started attending, for research, the church. I found out about the rich healing tradition and the spirituality and the faith of Filipinos,” Lemos said in an interview with ABS-CBN News The Filipino Channel in 2021.
In portraying femininity and coming-of-age onscreen, the filmmaker said she mirrored her own experiences as well as those of the women in her life.
To cast the young Filipino actress to play the title role, Lemos held open auditions in Athens, including in schools. That’s where she found newcomer Abigael Loma. Born in Quezon Province in the Philippines, Loma moved to Athens with her family when she was seven years old. She delivers many of her Holy Emy dialogues in Tagalog, the Philippines’ main language.
Loma laughed when she recalled attending the film’s first screening. “I was overwhelmed. I really didn’t know how to react. I didn’t know what to say about it. I was focusing on myself – that maybe I did bad,” she admitted. But Lemos claimed that many who saw the film were impressed by Loma and the whole cast.
In the director’s notes, Lemos explained that in tackling the immigrant experience, she wanted to shine a light on immigrants’ plight in Greece.
“A big issue in Greece is naturalization. Greece loves to give citizenship to immigrant children only when they bring accomplishments to Greece but still refuses to acknowledge second-generation Greeks. There is so much talent, richness in our immigrant communities and I hope that this movie could be a small step towards celebrating this second generation rather than continually ignoring its existence,” Lemos said.
In May 2022, Holy Emy won best fiction feature film at the 16th Los Angeles Greek Film Festival. Its other honors include an honorable mention in the first feature category at the 2021 Locarno International Film Festival.