crew

Florchita Bautista (left) and Marie Boti co-directed Brown Women
Blond Babies in 1992.
The documentary spotlighted the conditions of Filipino domestic
workers in Canada.

Their latest collaboration,
When Strangers Re-Unite, explores another aspect of the lives
of these marginalized migrant workers.

Productions Multi-Monde

Marie Boti - Director

When Strangers Re-Unite is the third in a series of films on labour migration directed by Montreal-based filmmaker Marie Boti. The series includes Brown Women Blond Babies (1991) and Modern Heroes Modern Slaves (1997), winner of the Canadian Association of Journalists Best Investigative Documentary Award. She has been involved in the production and direction of several films on intercultural and North-South relations, with a focus on the people's movement in the Philippines. She is co-founder of Productions Multi-Monde, a production company in Montreal.

Florchita Bautista - Director

Bautista is also co-director of Brown Women Blond Babies, the first film in the Productions Multi-Monde series on labour migration. She has been active in the Filipino-Canadian community for several years as a community organizer and advocate for the defense of migrant workers rights. As founder and co-ordinator of AWARE Filipino Family Services in Toronto, an organization supporting the reunification of families, she assisted dozens of women facing difficulties adjusting to life with their newly arrived families, hence the impetus for When Strangers Reunite.

Malcolm Guy - Producer

Guy is a director/producer of documentaries and fiction films. He is president of Productions Multi-Monde, founded in Montreal in 1987 with Marie Boti. His works include The Suit War (1997) and the documentary feature Moving the Mountain (1993) as director, Modern Heroes Modern Slaves and the feature film L'Oreille d'un sourd (1996) as producer. He has a particular interest in films dealing with social and political issues. He worked with co-directors Magnus Isaccson and Anna Paskal on a film on civil disobedience entitled Pressure Point and is developing a feature film Le Parfum du ciel, with Montreal-based filmmaker Leonce Ngabo.

Michelle Smith - Producer

Smith is a Monteal-based documentary filmmaker and producer. She worked with director Marie Boti on Modern Heroes Modern Slaves as co-writer and assistant director. She produced the animation film, The Stray Dog (1997) and A Time of Love and War, a tale of a friendship, solidarity and the Cold War by director Sabrina Mathews. She directed The Beat of a Thousand Drums (1998), which chronicles the protest events around APEC in Vancouver in November 1997 and recently finished work as a videographer for the series Culture Shock, a co-production of CBC Newsworld and RDI.