Production Notes

Director Arlene Ami first became aware of the mail-order bride phenomenon through her involvement with the Philippine Women Centre of B.C. Women from the Centre were doing outreach in rural communities across the province, and in the process met an alarmingly increasing number of women who had come to Canada as mail-order brides.

“I began to form relationships with some of these women and discovered that they had some very powerful, poignant stories. I knew that their voices needed to be heard and that people should be aware of the situations in which these women may find themselves upon coming to Canada. As a second generation Filipino-Canadian, this was an aspect of my community that had not been explored in any depth.”

“What really struck me when I went to Quesnel was that most of the Filipino women in that community were mail-order brides. Many of the men there have jobs in the logging industry. The women generally stayed at home, unless they had a part-time job working in the kitchen of a restaurant. There is not much to do there recreation wise.”

At first, coming up with the funding for SAY I DO was a bit of a challenge. People were telling Arlene that they had already seen programs about mail-order brides. In fact, what they had seen were television items from the male perspective about men searching for a mail-order bride, or about the industry itself. Together with Producer Erik Paulsson (Protection), Arlene convinced broadcasters that SAY I DO was going to be something no one had seen before. This documentary would dig deeper and explore the dynamics of these relationships.

The Canada Council for the Arts was the first source to give funding to SAY I DO. Arlene began the development phase, which included traveling to various parts of the Philippines. She tracked down specific women that she had seen on mail-order bride websites. “It was quite an adventure, me being a stranger to these women and introducing myself as a researcher from Canada who had seen them on the Internet. Some of their addresses were as vague as ‘the end of the road,’ at which point there would be a winding dirt path that led to more houses. When I finally came face to face with each woman, I felt transported. The faces that I had seen on my computer screen were suddenly live, breathing people.”

Arlene and Erik set out to gather the funding needed to go into production. CTV, Vision TV, Knowledge Network, and SCN came on board. Funding came in bits and pieces from Telefilm, the Canadian Television Fund, B.C. Film, and B.C. Arts Council. Eventually, additional support came in from the Rogers Documentary Fund and the Canadian Independent Film and Video Fund.

Once the finding was in place, Arlene set out with cinematographer Kim Derko (Law of Enclosures) and sound recordist Brooke Thomson (Heroines) to various small towns in British Columbia. They shot interviews in the northern towns of Quesnel and Prince George, in the Interior (Greenwood, the “smallest city in Canada”), and outside of Nanaimo on Vancouver Island.

Erik Paulsson joined Arlene and the crew for the Philippines leg of the shoot, where they did three weeks of shooting. “It felt very satisfying for me as a filmmaker to be there shooting SAY I DO. I felt as though what I was doing might actually make a difference.”

Once principal photography was wrapped, Arlene began to sift through the 50+ hours of footage with editor Tina Reilhan (No Storm Too Fierce). The editing process was quite intense at times. The interviews that had been conducted were very powerful, emotional, and disturbing. There would be instances where we had to just take a few moments to digest the material and move on. The editing process took six months and they came out with three versions of the documentary (one full length at 56 minutes, destined for film festivals, and two shorter broadcast versions for CTV and Vision TV).

Original music was composed by Don MacDonald (Last Wedding, Suspicious River).

SAY I DO was completed in July 2002 and is set to premiere at the Montreal World Film Festival. It will soon be made available to educational institutions and community organizations, and will be airing this fall on CTV and Vision TV.