Film Summary

La Casa de Mama Icha offers a profound meditation on notions of home and the inescapable pull of one’s motherland. The documentary follows María Dionisia Navarro, otherwise known as Mama Icha, on a physical and spiritual journey that draws on the complexities inherent to many migrant experiences: distance, the loved ones left behind, and the problem of aging in a country that doesn’t feel like your own.

At ninety-three, Mama Icha feels that the end of her life is near. Despite protests from her family, she spends her days focusing on just one thing: returning to her native village of Mompox in northern Colombia. Mama Icha dreams of passing her final years taking comfort in the landscapes of her youth, walking along the Magdalena River at dusk, surrounded by her relatives and neighbors in the courtyard of the house that she painstakingly had built during her years of absence, with the money she sent from abroad.

Thirty years prior, Mama Icha had emigrated to the United States to help her daughter with the care of her children, Mama Icha’s grandchildren, and remained ever since. Now, against the best wishes of her family in the U.S. who feel that she’s built an admirable life in Philadelphia complete with Social Security, a community that supports her, and access to important senior resources, ​​Mama Icha boards a plane and flies back to Colombia where she meets her sons, Gustavo and Alberto, who have been in charge of her house while she’s been gone.

But upon returning, the idyllic world of her memories is put up against a harsh reality of deteriorating family relationships and broken expectations. The confrontation is disappointing and forces Mama Icha to consider exactly how much she’s willing to sacrifice for the notion of home that she’s longed for so long.