By Kim Voynar Voynar@moviecitynews.com

Burma VJ: Reporting from a Closed Country Directed by Anders Østergaard

Posted Wednesday, May 27th, 2009 - Comments Off on Burma VJ: Reporting from a Closed Country Directed by Anders Østergaard
Be Sociable, Share!

Call it liberal Seattle guilt if you will, but I grew increasingly uncomfortable sitting in my comfortable theater seat and sipping my Vitamin Water while watching Burma VJ, a documentary about the struggle by the Democratic Voice of Burma to cover the September 2007 protests started by the country’s generally non-political monks and joined by hundreds of thousands of ordinary Burmese citizens.

Burma (known officially as the Union of Myanmar since 1989) has been under the thumb of an oppressive military regime since 1962, and its citizens have no freedom of speech or right to protest. There’s no free press in Burma, and outside press is not allowed in the country, so the government is able to operate largely off the radar from the rest of the world — except for the handful of brave journalists who comprise the Democratic Voice of Burma, an illegal journalistic enterprise that aims to document atrocities in Burma, smuggle their shaky, handheld video footage to Oslo, Norway, and then broadcast it via satellite out to the world, and back to Burma to counter the government’s propoganda campaign.

While the film overall suffers from the increasingly frequent documentary syndrome of subject matter more compelling than its cinematic style, I have to give the Burmese journalists a pass, given the circumstances under which they’re shooting, and the fact that they risk their lives to get the truth out to the world about what’s going on in their country. Being caught with a videocamera can get you, at the least, arrested, beaten, and thrown in a jail cell for a while; the generals take their campaign of oppression and control very seriously.

However, director Anders Østergaard could have used tighter editing to better flow the story, and I’m not sure the director’s choice to re-enact certain scenes with the real participants (faces hidden) is as effective as it would have been to play it straight, with just some simple, silhouetted interviews of the key players (those who aren’t dead or sitting in jail right now, anyhow) recount their stories, intercut and tightly edited with the raw, heartbreaking footage from the field by the DVB.

Still, the subject matter is riveting, unless you truly don’t give a rat’s ass about human rights issues, and the people of Burma suffering under this regime for over 40 years. Østergaard effectively uses the footage from the DVB to contrast the faces of the people of Burma before, during and after the protests: fear … radiant hope … dejection.

There may be some rough edges cinematically with this film, but the subject matter is so compelling, it’s worth watching — though you may, as you watch it,, feel more than a twinge of guilt over the freedoms we take for granted here, and the frivolity of what many of us do for a living relative to what the DVB journalists have do to fight for the lives and spirits of their people.
-by Kim Voynar

Be Sociable, Share!

Posted in Festivals, Seattle International Film Festival | Comments Off on Burma VJ: Reporting from a Closed Country Directed by Anders Østergaard

Comments are closed.

Quote Unquotesee all »

It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon