Details

With one midnight phone call, a little girl’s world is shaken up. Her grandmother is seriously ill, while she and her mother have to stay in Germany. Sheree Domingo’s evocative character art and stark dialogue cut to the heart of the Filipino migrant experience with the searing emotional effect of longing for far-off times and people.

Long Distance Call is an intergenerational narrative set in a German retirement home. Set against the backdrop of a hot summer day, the story artfully interweaves the memories and dreams of its three protagonists: a recently widowed elderly lady, a Filipino nurse juggling the demands of her job with the impending loss of her mother on the other side of the world, and her young daughter, whose vague memories of her grandmother merge with the anonymous faces around her. Dreams and memories merge as the three central characters face a common dilemma – the ever-present feeling of being in the wrong place.

While her words address themes of loss, distance, poverty, migration, and gender, Sheree Domingo’s blunt use of silence and ellipses gives the story a space for the unsaid. Lovingly drawn images tell the emotional journeys of the three women better than words could, inviting her audience to slip through the cracks and appreciate the story through their own sensibilities. Carefully chosen colors mark the narrative levels: Each story has its own color combination, and all echo parts of the author’s life.

Long Distance Call is the winner of the 2021 Grimmelshausen Förderpreis für Literatur in Germany.

REVIEW

“The whole world is told here in a tiny constellation, because poverty, migration, gender and age are the determining factors for the whole story. And all this in a plot that transcends borders and even continents. But Sheree Domingo never moralizes, she lets us draw our own conclusions on the basis of barely outlined and all the more interesting fates. That’s a great achievement for a comic debut.”
— Andreas Platthaus, German journalist, author, and expert on comic books