HOW TO CLEAN A HOUSE IN TEN EASY STEPS to Premiere at True/False Film Festival 2026
The debut film by Carolina González Valencia explores immigrant experiences through a hybrid documentary format.
How to Clean a House in Ten Easy Steps, the debut feature by director Carolina González Valencia, will world premiere at the 23rd edition of the True/False Film Festival, taking place March 5-8, 2026, in Columbia, Missouri. The film has also been selected as the 2026 recipient of the festival's True Life Fund, a philanthropic initiative that raises money and awareness for documentary subjects.
Produced by González Valencia, Brenda Ávila-Hanna and Olga Segura, the film follows Beatriz Valencia, a Colombian-born domestic worker in the United States, and her daughter Carolina-the filmmaker herself-as they collaborate to create a fictional alter ego: a writer. Moving fluidly between truth and fantasy, the hybrid documentary blends lived experience and imagination to explore immigration, labor, displacement, dreams, and the power of fiction to spark emancipation.
In 1998, Beatriz made the painful decision to migrate from Colombia to the U.S. States to provide for her family, leaving her two children behind. Decades later, mother and daughter face the possibility of another separation. As Carolina invites her mother to reclaim their story on their own terms, fiction becomes a space for healing, agency, and reconciliation.
Structured in ten chapters, the film weaves together docu-fiction, fantastical scenarios, and quotidian routines as Beatriz confronts aging, precarity, and the lack of protections afforded to domestic workers, while Carolina grapples with remaining in the United States as her mother prepares to return to Colombia.
González Valencia's playful and incisive debut arrives at a moment of renewed hostility toward immigrant communities, offering a timely reflection on labor, belonging, and creative resistance. Through its intimate lens, the film celebrates the resilience of immigrant workers and the transformative power of storytelling to ignite change.
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