Burma VJ On DVD

Set up a screening of Oscar nominated Burma VJ which Aung San Suu Khi recently showed at Rangoon’s Uncensored Film Festival, January 2012.

With William Hague’s recent visit and more broadcasted scenes from protestors, the Burma campaign is ramping up. So team Dogwoof are offering a 50% discount when you book a screening on Popup Cinema.

The first film to ever be screened at Downing Street, Burma VJ reveals the incredible bravery of Burmese video journalists during the great uprising.

Burma’s VJs keep up the flow of news from their closed country despite risking torture and life in jail. Armed with small handycams, they report undercover and smuggle material out of the country to be broadcast internationally.

It’s their footage which keeps the revolution alive….

Burma is one of the worst countries in the world to work as a journalist. The country is ranked number 4 from the bottom of Reporters Without Borders’ Press Freedom Index 2008, alongside countries like North Korea.

Anders Østergaard was originally planning to make a small half-hour portrait of a young Burmese video reporter, a member of an underground network of activists who daily risk their lives to document the oppressive conditions in the country. Then suddenly, in September 2007, chaotic events involving the rebellion of Buddhist monks against Burma’s military junta not only threw the local video reporters into the assignment of a lifetime, but also forced the Danish filmmaker to retool his project.

“To begin with, I was mainly interested in Joshua, my central character, as a young documentarian. He and his friends were filming with their cameras concealed in bags, which obviously is a major restriction on what they are able to document. My interest, then, was more about why they were even doing what they were doing. And why do they expose themselves to such risk? What are their thoughts about it and how are they affected by what they do? I was fascinated by Joshua’s almost instinctive need to document the world, which apparently came before any considerations about what political goals they might serve. My film was a small, intimate, psychological affair. Then came the rebellion and the dramatic turn of events in Burma was giving the film a whole other potential as an epic tale of high-political drama. At the same time, the material presented an obligation.”

Østergaard and the filmmakers now had the opportunity to tell the story of the rebelling monks from the inside – the people’s eye perspective. While everyone else had only pieces of the story, Magic Hour Films suddenly had an impressive volume of footage that allowed them to more or less reconstruct the whole sequence of events, becoming the chronicler of world history.

For obvious reasons, Østergaard couldn’t disclose the identity of his 27-year-old video reporter known as “Joshua,” or name any of the other activists supplying this rich material. Accordingly, the film revolves around a person whose face we never see. The filmmaker answered that challenge in part by concluding that, even though we can’t see the main character, Joshua, we can still see with him.

“Once we’d figured out how we were going to experience Burma through Joshua’s eyes, we started debating how to connect all his footage and how to depict the circumstances he was working under. To be sure documenting things, but what happens just before or just after these shots is just as exciting.”

Østergaard didn’t actually ask Joshua to leave his camera on. Instead he decided to recreate a truthful representation of the situations around the authentic shots, like telephone conversations in close collaboration with Joshua and the people involved.