Andrew Chen’s Ilo Ilo (2013) is part of an increasing number of East and Southeast Asian films that examine the impact of migrant domestic work on the family structures of the host country and the migrant worker’s home community. Partly autobiographical, Ilo Ilo looked into the experiences of a middle-class Singaporean family and their newly hired Filipino maid against the backdrop of the Asian Financial Crisis. Chen used the characters to explore the contradictions of a transactional transnational family, while the central conflict addressed the trauma coming from the disintegration of such a family and the hope for eventual reunification. Critically acclaimed and commercially successful, Singaporeans celebrated Ilo Ilo for its empathy, sentimentality, and rejection of the stereotyped images of domestic workers. While not a box office hit in the Philippines, the film did inspire a highly publicized campaign to reunite Chen with his Filipino “surrogate” mother. This paper will compare and contextualize these responses using the Philippines’ history of exporting domestic labor to Singapore. Doing so will reveal the similarities and differences of how the home and host countries reconcile the traumas created by labor migration and how such reconciliation is dramatized and consumed in discursive forms.