Simona Koch | Tirando piedras a la luna

After decades of working as a cleaner in Switzerland to send money to her family, Joli yearns to go back home to the Dominican Republic. Simona Koch’s Master film Tirando piedras a la luna captures this delicate turning point in Joli’s immigration story, as she looks back at everything she left behind, and everything her years in Switzerland took from her.

Eugénie Bouquet (EB): Simona, can you tell us a bit more about who Joli is to you? What made you want to centre her as a protagonist, as opposed to your mom for example?

Simona Koch (SK): Joli had always been part of our lives. She joined our family celebrations, outings, and special occasions for many years. Yet, for a long time, I barely paid attention to her story. To me, she was simply my mother's close friend, someone who lived alone and enjoyed spending time with our family. Like many young people, I was busy with my own life and rarely stopped to wonder about hers. Everything changed one day at a Christmas market. My mother casually turned to Jolanda and said, “Your life could be a film. You have been through so much.” That simple remark immediately caught my attention. I started asking questions, and the more I learned, the more I realized how “different” her life had been. What impressed me most was everything Joli had accomplished entirely on her own. She showed incredible resilience, strength, and determination, yet her story had remained almost invisible within our society. What moved me even more was the simplicity of her dreams. While many of us take certain things for granted, Joli's greatest wish was simply to be reunited with her family. That longing, together with everything she endured, made me realize that her story deserved to be told. Although my mother also played an important role in this journey, it was Joli's perspective that felt essential to me. Through her, I could tell a much larger story about migration, sacrifice, resilience, and the universal human desire to belong and to be with the people we love.

EB: Your film explores an aspect of the immigration story that’s rarely emphasised: the possibility or moment where one “goes back home”. What made you want to document it as you did and how did you go about it?

SK: Joli never intended to stay in Switzerland for so long, and she certainly never imagined being separated from her two sons for decades. Every winter, when there was less work and money became tight, she would say “Next year, I'll go home”. She repeated this year after year. But somehow, there was always a reason to stay. Over time, work became routine, and she also felt responsible for supporting the family members who depended on her financially. She had built a life around her job, a job she was genuinely proud of, and leaving became increasingly difficult. Her dream of returning home slowly faded into the background, not because she no longer wanted it, but because everyday life kept postponing it. I wanted the film to reflect this reality. It is about how dreams can gradually be pushed aside by routine, responsibility, and survival. People often become trapped in a cycle where there is little space to stop, reflect, or make life-changing decisions. Instead, they keep moving forward, postponing what matters most. By documenting the moment when Joli finally decided to return, I wasn't only interested in the journey itself.. I wanted to capture everything that had prevented that journey for so many years, and the emotional complexity of finally taking a step she had dreamed about for decade.

EB: Can you tell us a bit more about the role of tourism in your film? There are quite a few scenes of Joli enjoying the local Swiss scenery intertwined with scenes of her at work.

SK: Joli lived in Lucerne, one of Switzerland's most visited tourist destinations, yet she rarely had the opportunity to experience the city as a visitor herself. For many years, she cleaned the boats that carried tourists across the lake, but she had hardly ever been on one as a passenger. She also cleaned offices and many other spaces that were part of the city's everyday life, yet some of its most iconic landmarks remained surprisingly distant. Although she lived just around the corner from the Lion Monument, she had never actually stopped to visit it. She simply walked past it on her way to work. She had also never been to Mount Pilatus, despite it being one of Lucerne's best-known attractions. When Joli believed she was spending her final year in Switzerland, and I believed it too, she decided she wanted to experience the country differently. Before returning home, she wanted to visit some of the places she had spent decades maintaining but had never truly had the chance to enjoy. For me, these scenes reveal an important contrast. Tourism is usually associated with freedom, leisure, and discovery, while Joli's relationship with these same places was defined by work and responsibility. By following her as she experiences them for the first time, the film gently shifts her perspective from someone who serves these places to someone who is finally allowed to inhabit and enjoy them herself. This transformation became an important visual and emotional thread throughout the film.

EB: The film dwells on the relationship between gender, parenthood and immigration, with Jodi speaking for example on her relationship with her sons, that was strained by her life away from them. Was that an important topic to you from the start or did it naturally come up as you were following Joli?

SK: I try to involve the protagonists of my films as much as possible. Participation is very important to me. In this case, Jolanda had a lot of influence on the process and we planned the shooting days together. It was important to me to create a character based film, shaped closely around her perspective and lived experience. Her relationship with her sons, and the guilt she carried in relation to them, was something that came up repeatedly from the very beginning. It was not an abstract theme imposed later in the editing process, but a lived emotional reality that was already present in her everyday reflections and in our conversations. For that reason, it felt like a natural part of the film rather than an additional layer. As I followed Joli more closely, it became even clearer how central this tension between motherhood, distance, and responsibility was in her life. It gradually shaped the narrative in a very organic way.

EB: Would you like to tell us a bit more about your plans for future projects or other themes that you’d like to explore?

SK: In the film, Joli explains that she originally came to Switzerland as a bailarina. She only planned to stay for eight months before returning home, but things became more complicated and her stay extended far beyond what she had anticipated. This detail sparked my curiosity, and I began asking more questions about the bailarina topic and the experiences connected to it. Interestingly, after screenings of Tirando Piedras a la Luna, one of the most frequent questions I receive, after “Where is Jolanda now?”, is about this very subject. It seems to resonate with many viewers and opens up a wider curiosity about that history and context. For my next project, I am continuing to explore stories from the Dominican community, this time focusing on women with personal or family experiences of migration. Building on this, the film is also informed by my mother’s own history, which is connected to this context and shaped by similar promises and expectations upon arriving in Switzerland. This next film expands on those questions, moving beyond Joli’s individual story to a broader reflection on migration, femininity, work, and the gap between initial intentions and lived reality.