A Decade of Honest Storytelling: Documenting Burma in the Years of Partial Freedom

Still image from Burma Spring 21, a short documentary film

Between 1962 to 2011, when Burma was under authoritarian rule, nobody could have made a film like The Vote, a 12-min short that chronicles an NLD party member's election campaign and her supporters' cautious optimism. Released in 2016, the film lays bare the fragile nature of democracy during the transition period from military to civilian rule. The punishing storm of the day of the election results captured on film, seems to foreshadow the malicious forces that were waiting to undo the democratic process even then. 

Back then, movies like Burma Storybook (2017) or Golden Kingdom (2016) might not have been made either. The former takes us into the crowded living quarters and somber psyche of Maung Aung Pwint, a former political prisoner who regrets his failings as a father and seeks solace in poetry. The latter gives us a panoramic view of small lives -- a group of young Buddhist novices -- threatened by the encroaching civil war. Under the former strongman Ne Win's administration, films like these would have been rejected outright in the script stage by the censor board.

Movies like Burma VJ (2007), were exceptions. With grainy footage of downtown protests smuggled out of the country, the movie reveals the military junta's vicious response to the monk-led Saffron revolution. The filmmakers' reliance on reenactments for certain critical scenes, shows the danger of documentary filmmaking in the era of fear. 

With the military coup of February 1, the period of partial opening (2011-2021) came to an abrupt end. The country is now hurtling back to the era of fear, the Orwellian atmosphere many thought they had left behind in the history books. For the pioneering documentary filmmakers, the cost of filmmaking just got a lot higher -- arrest, torture, or death.

Still image from The Vote, a film about an NLD candidate's campaign

The Age of Dishonesty

Growing up in the 70s and the 80s in Rangoon, I couldn't help but notice the country as depicted in the popular films was vastly different from the unfiltered reality around me. Ninety percent of the domestic box office hits were formulaic romantic comedies, featuring characters dressed in skinny jeans and imported shirts, living in air-conditioned homes unaffordable to most. 

While divorced from reality, such escapist films were also safe to produce and assured to pass the censor board, because they carried no social criticism, no political massage. People in the movies never seemed to sweat, never rode the crowded buses my sister and I rode everyday; they never complained about the price of rice or fish like my mom and other housewives did. 

The only documentaries I recalled seeing were the propaganda films touting the success of the Burmese Socialist Party's initiatives, shot by the government's information ministry. They invariably featured some minister (often someone in a military uniform) inspecting a factory of a fishery, feigning expertise he didn't possess.

Documentary, I later come to realize, requires honesty, a dedication to reveal the unvarnished reality. Authoritarianism, on the other hand, demands dishonesty, because it must maintain the illusion that the citizens are happy when they are deeply unhappy. Thus, documentary filmmaking is incompatible with authoritarianism.

In the bloodiest days of the 1988 student uprising, I turned on the TV to find a football match and nonstop coverage of military parades. There was no mention of the soldiers shooting at the protesters or the wounded lying in the ditches. 

Burma Spring Benefit Film Fest Trailer from Gaetano Maida on Vimeo.

The Clues to the Coup

In April, some documentary filmmakers and activist friends invited me to join them in their project to raise funds to support the growing anti-coup protests and the civil disobedience movement in Burma. Last week, we launched the Burma Spring Benefit Online Film Festival, featuring more than 30 films from and about Burma, all available to stream during the festival's duration for a modest donation. For me, it's not just a fundraiser but also a tribute to the pioneering documentary filmmakers.

Burma Spring 21, a 5-min short in the festival's lineup, sums up the people's resistance, from the swelling waves of protests to the nightly banging of pots and pans. But this is an unfinished story, history still in the making, so no tidy end with victory or defeat for one side or the other.

I have also been watching the films made in the last decade, looking for clues to the coup. In My Buddha is Punk, Kyaw Kyaw, a 25-year-old Burmese punk rocker, finds the courage to speak up for persecuted ethnic minorities. In gel-coated hair and Doc Martin boots, he is already at odds with his sarong-clad fellow countrymen in the conservative Buddhist society. His stance on human rights makes him more of an eyesore. The culture clash, I believe, is a contributing factor to the communal conflicts during the transition period, giving opportunists and hardliners a chance to position themselves as the guardians of the traditional way of life -- the Buddhist Burman way of life.

In Quarter Number Zero, displaced survivors of Cyclone Nargis build a thriving community on the edge of Yangon. In the heart of this "illegal township," hopes, dreams, romance, and acts of charity blossom amid the cut-throat fish market, low-waged factories, and rain-thrashed streets. The marginalized community's struggle highlights the growing inequality, a result of economic transformation at breakneck speed. 

In the 11-min animation short My Life I Don't Want, the animators depict the burden of being born a girl in a society that undervalues womanhood and treats it as an inferior existence. In the 28-min short Mother, Daughter, Sister, the unsolved murders of two volunteer Kachin teachers expose the military's impunity. In the sociopolitical climate of Burma documented in these films, the troubling preconditions of the coup emerged. 

The Cost of Documenting the Coup

In the transition period, some topics were tabooed (the Army's role in politics and the Rohingya crisis, to name but two), but a partial opening with limited freedom gave birth to a stellar documentary film community. With the repressive military back at the helm now, that opening is closing fast, and the documentary filmmakers are under threat.

One Burmese filmmaker who contributed her film to the festival was briefly detained. The people behind Burma Spring 21 cannot be named because doing so will put them in peril. Some filmmakers are on the run or in hiding, because they are on the list of dissidents charged under Section 505, which penalizes the broadly defined "speeches" that might cause fear or alarm.

Military rule is not favorable to documentary filmmaking, because, in its kangaroo courts, telling the truth is a punishable offense.