How To Clean a House in 10 Easy Steps (2026) Documentary Review: A Keenly Observed Portrait that Blends the Personal and the Political

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Immigration has been a contentious topic for the past year or so. Judging by all the heated arguments surrounding it, a lot of anger stemmed from prejudiced notions, which overshadowed a nuanced understanding of the underlying geopolitical situation. Even recent political campaigns focused far more on ethnic or racial differences than on issues affecting the working class as a whole.

At places where the campaigns did focus on the working class, it seemed like they were specifically designed to incite anger based on race or religion, posing other socio-economically disadvantaged communities as the threat. It put a lot of innocent lives at risk, which makes you realize just how big a currency hatred is.

Carolina Gonzalez Valencia’s new documentary (Original title: “Cómo Limpiar una Casa en Diez Pasos Fáciles”) underscores these issues with a lot of love and tenderness, which makes it, by nature, feel radical. Titled “How To Clean a House in 10 Easy Steps,” the 80-minute documentary explores the director’s relationship with her mother, Beatriz, through a hybrid of facts and fiction.

Born in Colombia, Beatriz moved to the US in the late 1990s in search of a different life. She started doing domestic chores for a rich family while being away from her own. So, the documentary, which explores details about her past life, also serves as a mode of healing for Carolina, as she reflects on those bittersweet memories with due compassion.

On the one hand, the film documents facts about Beatriz and Carolina’s relationship, while offering a layer of interpretation through fiction. In that second layer, we meet Beatriz as an accomplished author whose book has the same title as the film. It offers an instructional guide to the very thing it says, almost in the fashion of Marie Kondo’s instructional guides.

Yet, unlike the cold summaries of usual non-fiction, it feels extremely personal. It’s not only because the writer has put a lot of heart into it, but because it is inherently personal. It matters more since it’s being narrated by an immigrant domestic worker, also a woman, whose life was also affected due to those identity markers.

In the documentary, Carolina mentions how her mother grew up loving dance and music, and once hoped to pursue it as her vocation. However, with her life moving in another direction, she had to abandon those dreams. She still maintained her love for dance and continued enjoying it in some shape or form.

Yet, that may not be the future that her younger self would have imagined herself living. That’s why Carolina’s fictional experiment might have offered her a chance to relive some of her happy memories without being burdened by the weight of the unfortunate details.

The directorial approach seems deceptively simple for a documentary that probes into the political aspects of Beatriz’s reality while maintaining a lighthearted tone. Although an endearing look into a mother-daughter bond, the film becomes just as fascinating as a thought experiment, where our takeaway is more than the knowledge of the sum of its parts. So, even at times when the film isn’t directly addressing some of its central elements, they remain as an undercurrent, subtly reminding us of everything endured and strived for.

It all makes this film an evocative portrait of a person and a relationship without limiting itself to the usual methods of structuring a similar project. In her innovative approach, Carolina includes animated drawings alongside archival details and candid interviews in the present. The animation helps translate feelings where the words may not suffice, while the interviews reveal another side of Beatriz, showing her unbridled innocence. Daniel Chávez Ontiveros and Gonzalo Escobar Mora’s editing also deserves credit for fluidly transitioning between all the film’s inventive modes of narration.

The director also uses alternative ways to explore her and her mother’s lives after moving away from their homeland. While offering an insight into Beatriz’s mental landscape at the time, the production also offers Carolina a kinder lens to reflect on those details and her own unflattering experiences. It is partially reminiscent of Sophie looking back at her past with her father in Charlotte Wells’s 2022 film, “Aftersun,” even if, unlike that, Carolina’s film is gloomy mainly in its undertones.

Since the documentary is structured like an autofiction, some elements of Beatriz’s life are not thoroughly discussed. The film doesn’t dwell on the reasons behind the departure or on her mother’s early years in the US as a domestic worker. So, it isn’t a comprehensive or exhaustive look into Beatriz’s life leading to her more peaceful present.

Yet, it seems to be like that by design — as the fiction can be considered a form of course-correction, offering Beatriz the dignity she deserves in a refined narrative instead of plunging into the painful details of her past. It’s something that only a person who understands it closely and has lived through similar struggles may realize. So, the documentary becomes a moving ode to the power of love and resilience without resorting to deliberate modes of cinematic evocation.