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| BURMA VJ: Reporting for a Closed Country
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“This is and will remain the definitive portrait of life in one of the world's most repressive and isolated military dictatorships.” At once an inspiring picture of popular empowerment through digital technology and a chilling indictment of enduring dictatorship in Burma, this film was a fitting winner of the top prize at December’s prestigious Amsterdam Documentary Festival (IDFA) and found further acclaim this January in Sundance. Centering on the experiences of Joshua, a young underground journalist, Burma VJ celebrates the achievement of the Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB), a non-profit media organisation whose members risked their lives to film the 2007 uprising against the junta. They then smuggled and transported their footage of the protests and the subsequent crackdown out of their closed country and onto the world’s key news networks. Danish documentarian Anders Østergaard (Tintin and Me) shows us the footage anew in the context of the exploits of Joshua and others who filmed it and who became, as a consequence, primary targets of the regime’s wrath. To protect the anonymity of those still operating he’s restaged the clandestine processes by which they managed their coverage, and collected and uploaded it to an office in Norway. Purists have quibbled about the interplay of recreations with actual footage, but audiences will be in no doubt when it comes to identifying the real courage on display here.
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