Collecting Diaspora Stories for Over a Decade

Brother and sister team, Tom Mae and Reet Mae, from Mae Productions Inc., have worked together for many years on numerous creative film/video projects. For over a decade, in collaboration with the Estonian Studies Centre, they have been collecting stories of our elders, in Canada, and the US East coast, who were born in free Estonia, and fled during the WWII years, most in the Suurpõgenemine/Great Baltic Escape of 1944. In this multi-film series “In Search of Our Fathers/Meie isade otsingul” (ISOOF) we look more broadly at the men’s stories from WWII in the Baltic nations as well as how these are reflected in the Russian war in Ukraine, starting with Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the full-out invasion on Feb. 24, 2044, Estonian Independence Day.

 Together they have won a number of awards for their work in film and mental health, in addition to Tom’s work in commercials, including the following: