You’re surveyed through a gun-sight during twenty of every thirty seconds of every minute. If you look at a soldier directly, you’re asking for attention. If you look down at your basket in your hands, it’s apparent you’re concealing something. If you appear wary of your surroundings or point or even walk unsteadily, there are people who’d immediately know. If the authorities spot you, they’d be on you in ten seconds. If they search you, they’d question you and confiscate your possessions, including the little basket in your hand. If they do that, they’ll find the red gunny bag.
If they get the bag, they’ll find the camera concealed inside. And then, before you could think of what went wrong before you were busted, your fate has already been decided between state sponsored- torture and a point-blank gunshot to your forehead. This isn’t a land of your rights or mine. It’s junta-ruled Burma. There is no government nor police. At-least, none that fits the definition of catering to the needs of a population, which in itself defies it’s meaning for existence, since the sole purpose of the two is to suppress you, in case you raise your voice upon the junta.
In simple terms, you’re the hostage. The government is your enemy, and you’re the government’s enemy. The police is it’s weapon of force: An army ready to crush even the solitary ant that shows signs of defiance. You show resilience, they kill you. You appear suspicious, they kill you. You try and convince them with your subservience, they still kill you. Journalists are criminals, you’re a mind-freak if you walk the streets with a camera visible in your hands.
This is what you gather during the first twelve minutes of Burma VJ: Reporting from a Closed Country, though all that you see is the insides of that gunny bag covering your line of vision and an unedited sound sequence that speak volumes of the tension (watch trailer below). Yet, for our guerrilla styled journalist aliased “Joshua”, being caught and facing sure-fire death is only half of his worries. His other half is more anxious about the deteriorating condition of the camera, and the valuable hours of battery power going to waste. His entire self-appointed purpose in life now depends on a cheap, rechargeable lump of lithium!
The camera does come out briefly and beholds burma, a sight that jumps right out of a 1970s communist-era chinese film-set. Everybody around appears the same. Whether you’re alone or in company, walking or riding people simply stare.
There is no conversation in the public unless it’s utterly important. People speak in hushed voices. Even the rickety public buses are devoid of human sound. The lone sound breaks the silence of voiceless drone. It’s a megaphone that’s high enough to echo the voice of the announcer all the way up to the center of the town. It’s a blunt announcement from the Junta HQ that the price of fuel has been doubled with immediate effect.
People listen quietly and carry on with their lives, fully knowing what this really means. Everything is going to be double the price from tomorrow. And for no clear reason too. It’s an order, live with it. No one asks why, no one raises a voice in public, even the strongest at heart would be discouraged by such a public attitude. And that’s the way things are run in Burma. But wait, you’re not supposed to know all this if you’re not inside Burma. What you’re seeing is banned footage, that’s shot first-hand by our protagonist-hero Joshua, who runs an outlawed television network wing, The Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB).
Burma VJ
Joshua’s identity should naturally be kept a secret, due to the clandestine journalism he must continue in order to keep the outside world abreast of what’s really happening inside this iron wall-ed country. DVB gathers footage by deploying some twenty odd volunteers with cameras and microphones. These men and women spread into crowds and gathering of public demonstrations.
Their job is to take as much footage of the happenings as possible. These footage are then smuggled through couriers via neighboring countries like Thailand, or through the internet to Oslo, from where they are shared worldwide to news channels like CNN and BBC, who relay them back to Burma. Mind the fact that apart from the sole love for their people in their hearts, these volunteers are neither trained camera-men, nor are they trained in emergency situation handling, in case they encounter violence, or in worst of worst cases get caught and lose their lives. You might think it’s madness in both ways.
The footage acquired might never be evidential enough without proper spying devices, and these volunteers might give away valuable information about the DVB’s secret operations. But at the end of the first 30 minutes of the film, you lose all need of doubt when you look at Joshua (and hear other DVB members) crying at the extremely rare, blurred image of Aung-San-Suu-Kyi they managed to film when protesters were surprisingly allowed to venture close to the democratic leader’s house, where she’s being held under house arrest for the past decade.
That scene is so heartbreaking that given the circumstances, even reason itself wouldn’t be able to fathom why such a misfortune should befall such a nation in these times that we live in: Times when self-proclaimed, self-appointed world-ambassadors of goodwill and peace conquer much more violent, terrorism-infested nations with ease, by brute force under false pretexts of impending danger to the world while all the time the objectives seem to be nothing but carrying their tall banners of wealth, so tall that the blood-red dust of destruction would fail to soil the silky white above, all the while when countries such as Burma languish inside an information abyss.
Burma VJ gradually becomes more of a work-in progress, not just a mere documentary that shows the power of guerrilla journalism. It’s a call for help by that smaller voice inside every hopeful Burmese’s mind.
The film itself focuses on the Saffron Revolution, an uprising by the Buddhist monks in 2007, the first signs of any major protest since 1989 when nearly three thousand people were killed as the junta brought the demonstrations to halt, effectively so after putting the democratic leader Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest, even until today. These protests by the Buddhist monks rapidly gathered momentum and volume, mostly as the unstoppable monks were seen as the last force of power against the junta.
Though the monks refused to turn political, they cite their sole purpose in staging the famous marches in around 25 cities across the country simultaneously, being the liberation of the people. The Burmese thought the dictators wouldn’t dare to attack the monks, but within the next few hours, public gatherings of more than five are banned, and people are warned against police firing.
The protests are eventually suppressed as the army does the unthinkable and starts beating up the monks and carrying them away in trucks to undisclosed locations. A Japanese reporter is shot dead at close range. A dead body of a monk is found floating on the Yangon river. Young adults cower in a stairway praying for strength in the face of death.
And the DVB is there to record it all. The regime quickly understands the power of the camera and the reporters are constantly chased by government intelligence agents who look at the ”media saboteurs” as the biggest prey they can get. However, the important mission is not forfeited, even as the DVB members watch helplessly as their offices are being raided by the police.
Anders Østergaard’s film takes on the terrifying immediacy of home-made horror, as he carefully assembles the scrambled, jittery video recordings with a little bit of post-production in between for that added sense of dramatization.
Joshua having to flee his country initially for fear of being captured a second time operates out of Thailand. All of the post-production scenes show a silhouette of this emotional, but brave young man sitting with frustration, as he listens to his crew over phone-calls, patiently waiting for video feed on his computer.
“Burma VJ” ends without any real, direct hope. But as long as the country’s people hunger for freedom, and a few citizens are brave enough to document the atrocities around them on video, there’s always hope for a better tomorrow.
Subscribe here to the YouTube channels of the Democratic Voice of Burma (I think they’ve posted the entire movie online in nine parts) and the Burma VJ Movie channel. Visit http://burmavjmovie.com/ and http://www.dvb.no/ for further info, spread the word and show your support on Twitter and Facebook It’s taken an Academy award nomination for a film of such importance to hold ground and reach our for help, let’s not wait for something bad to happen in order to confront the apalling reality.
[ via bollywood-mania ]
thanks looks like Indians are getting interested in Burma at last
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