The harsh reality of Burmese politics documented on film

Director: Anders Østergaard
Screenwriter: Anders Østergaard
Rating: 18

Originally, Anders Østergaard had only been intending to produce a 30 minute documentary about underground journalists in Burma, but then the largest protests in almost 20 years broke out, and the Danish director found himself telling a much bigger story. Burma VJ chronicles the days in September 2007 when hundreds of thousands of people marched against the authoritarian ruling party, in full knowledge that 3,000 people died in uprising of 1988.

The VJs, video journalists, of the title are the Democratic Voice of Burma, an illegal network of reporters known who go to extraordinary lengths to let the wider world know what is happening in their country. The film is made up of documentary footage framed by the story of Joshua, a reporter who coordinates DVB’s movements in the field and gives context to the events.

Filming on camera phones and hand-held camcorders hidden in rucksacks, with the constant threat of imprisonment or worse, the reporters transmit their footage by satellite to a base in Oslo, Norway, where it is sent to news organisations across the globe, and back into Burma.

Throughout, one of the most captivating things about Burma VJ is that, instead of brief snapshots of demonstrations on the evening news, you get to see the protests evolve, from a handful of monks to a gigantic press of people thronging the streets of Rangoon, the camera scanning up to reveal crowds of people in every balcony, chanting slogans and applauding the marchers.

If the film was fictional, no audience would stand for its ending. The government responded quickly and viciously, quelling the uprising with beatings, arrests, tear gas and gunfire, and taking down the country’s three internet providers in an attempt to stem the reporters’ flow of damning footage to the outside world. The DVB itself was shut down shortly after, and three of its reporters now face a lifetime in prison.

As well as a defiant, brutally sad account of a failed rebellion, Burma VJ is also a meditation on the potential of new media. Despite controlling all Burmese newspapers and television channels, the government was unable to prevent the Democratic Voice of Burma from plastering images of protest and injustice across every major news network in the world. As the credits roll, we see the work of a new collection of citizen journalists, recording the devastation after the Cyclone Nargis disaster of May 2008. Burma will never be as closed again.

Burma VJ is in cinemas from 17th July via Dogwoof Pictures in collaboration with the Co-operative

By Tom Brown