An omnibus featuring ten short films about how people have reacted to the brutal realities of life under a bloodthirsty military regime, Myanmar Diaries is first and foremost a powerful artistic statement of defiance against tyranny, and an important window through which the international community can view and understand the political situation and public sentiments in the country.
Just as importantly, it offers viewers an opportunity to gauge the imaginative and innovative spirit driving young Burmese filmmakers, as ten of them employ stylistically diverse approaches – from cellphone-shot cinema verité to allegorical drama – to put across their collective cris du coeur. Their passion and talents are now in deep peril, given the censorship and outright violence being meted out against anyone who dares to think and dissent in the country.
Produced by the Dutch ZIN Documentaire, Myanmar Diaries is actually the company’s third Burmese production to bow at a major European festival in less than a year. Following two shorts (Sad Film in Venice and Letter to San Zaw Htay at IDFA), Myanmar Diaries is the climactic finale that’s worth every bit of the attention – if not more – given to the 2008 Burma VJ: Reporting from a Closed Country, Anders Østergaard’s critically acclaimed documentary made up of footage filmed by anonymous Burmese video journalists of the anti-military demonstrations in 2007.
Myanmar Diaries begins with what seems to be the only segment in which the “filmmaker” is known and named. A video made by fitness instructor Khing Hnin Wai, it features her doing a Gangnam Style routine with a vast and empty boulevard as a backdrop. As she gyrates her hips and punches the air, a convoy of black armoured cars streams past behind her, speeding through a distant military checkpoint and away into the distance.
Inadvertently, Khing recorded a coup in progress, with the cars actually carrying military officers on their way to oust and arrest Aung San Suu Kyi and her ministers in parliament. It’s perhaps an apt starting point for what is to follow, when the Myanmar military began to roll back the social and political liberalisation in the country during the past decade.
Like Burma VJ, Myanmar Diaries has its share of guerilla-style footage about confrontations and crackdowns: the bloody aftermath of soldiers opening fire at demonstrations, a pensioner standing up against a police convoy and admonishing the cops for betraying the people, a violent raid and the arrest of unarmed civilians. There are also images of activists fleeing the city and joining the resistance in the mountains.
But other segments are driven by visual poetry and experimentation – a necessity, perhaps, given how the double whammy of state violence and Covid-19 has forced filmmakers (and people in general) to stay indoors and cast their critical eye inwards.
So a civil servant’s struggle between keeping his job or joining the protests is manifested in dream-like segments of him having his head bound in garbage bags; a young activist’s decision to risk her life to embark on a doomed fight against the army is made heart-breaking through the poetic rendering of her life. Animation, meanwhile, highlights the way those in power are crushing the masses, like monstrous crickets feeding on ants.
Compiled by Czech filmmaker Petr Lom (Burmese Playbook), who remains uncredited in the film as a gesture of solidarity with the Burmese filmmakers, Myanmar Diaries offers a sharp and poignant snapshot of the collective trauma and hopes of a people living through unimaginably horrendous times.
Director-screenplay-cinematography-editing: The Myanmar Film Collective
Producer: Corinne van Egeraat
Production companies: ZIN Documentaire in association with Ten Thousand Images
World sales: Autlook Film Sales
Venue: Berlin Film Festival (Panorama)
In Burmese
70 minutes
