Solutions to local problems must be sought in an international arena, as globalization increases the cross-border communication among workers who have a common cause. As activist documentaries with a cause, Daughters of Ixchel and Women of Change both employ documentary techniques that undermine their claims to objective truth, particularly with use of the didactic narrator. The video allows us to see Xu Li Li's dilemma for ourselves - how she gains emotional and financial independence by leaving her family at the same time that she misses them desperately. As good Buddhist daughters, they accept their fate in this life and make merit for the next by working in the factories. As the documentary states, the girls are like water buffalo carrying the Thai economic miracle on their backs.
Someone has to pay the price of economic growth.
Because the money they send back to the Philippines is the largest contribution to the country's wealth, the government hesitates to insist on reforms that might jeopardize the financial success of the arrangement. Like all of the films reviewed here, Modern Heroes, Modern Slaves moves us with its images and interviews of the women themselves, women who have fled abusive employers and now wait, penniless, in a shelter in the Filipino embassy in the United Arab Emirates. Because only those countries which are host to such large multinational corporations are going to profit from it. But countries like the Philippines, and to some degree Canada, are countries that will be controlled more by foreign corporations and foreign countries. We're going to have more unemployment as our companies close because they can't compete.