by David Eimer
Corn fields and fallow rice paddies marked the boundary of the village. They are the last remnants of the land its people once owned and worked. ‘My great-grandfather came here first,’ remarked the elder, who was sixty-six. ‘And my family had land here since then. But the army started taking my land from me in 1988 and now I have none. That is what I miss the most. I am a landless person.’
Asking what he expected to happen to them seemed foolish, given their lack of land and freedom. ‘We have no future under these conditions. It is impossible for us to be happy the way we live. Many people want to leave for Malaysia, but it is too difficult now. In the future we will try and leave, like the Rohingya in the north,’ he said. ‘If we don’t, we will disappear anyway. In another fifteen years there won’t be any of us left here.’
Returning to Sittwe in the early evening to be confronted with apparent normality was disturbing. Men played chinlone by the side of the main road, passing a rattan ball around, keeping it airborne all the time. Food stalls were being set up under the wall that hides the Jama Mosque. Motorbikes weaved their way home. But a few streets away was Aung Mingalar and just outside town were the camps and forgotten villages. Hidden away, or forced into exile, the Rohingya are being erased from the landscape as if they were never here, their history and that of Rakhine State rewritten without recourse to facts or pity.
12
The Dream Factory
Restricting the media’s ability to operate, either by censorship, repressive laws or refusing access to sensitive areas, as in the case of Rakhine State and the other conflict-ravaged regions of the borderlands, is a tactic the NLD have adopted from the military. Soon after their coup, the generals set up the Press Scrutiny and Registration Division, housed in a building occupied by the Japanese secret police in the Second World War, to make sure journalists and writers toed the line. Other censors were employed to do the same for artists and film-makers.
Yet the junta was merely following the example set by the British. They were assiduous in their efforts to muffle the local media, banning books, movies, newspapers and pamphlets. Even so, there were more than two hundred local periodicals in circulation by 1940. Advocates of independence were quick to realise the power of both the printed word and celluloid. They politicised those exposed to them, as well as projecting an image of Bamar identity to unite the country, ethnic minorities excepted, against the British.
Colonial Rangoon was a city bereft of art galleries, museums and libraries, but there were plenty of cinemas and film would prove to be highly influential in the struggle for self-determination. The very first film shown in Rangoon was an account of Japan’s victory in the 1904–5 Russo-Japanese War. Japan’s triumph had a huge impact on nascent nationalists – an Asian country defeating a European power in battle for the first time – and the opponents of colonial rule would quickly co-opt the fledgling movie industry to their cause.
Burma’s first film appeared in 1919, a documentary following the funeral of an early campaigner for independence. A year later came the country’s debut movie, Love and Liquor, a cautionary tale of the evils of alcohol and gambling, vices associated with the colonists. Like all Burmese productions from the 1920s the film is now lost, but its makers would go on to found A1 Film Company, the local version of a Hollywood dream factory.
By the 1930s A1 occupied twenty-five acres in the north of Rangoon. ‘We had six sound stages and they were full all the time. We had a separate post-production facility in downtown. We were bigger than anything else in Southeast Asia. We’d shoot comedies, horror, musicals, dramas,’ recalled Ko Myint, the great-grandson of A1’s founder, when I visited him at the rambling, now dilapidated teak house his ancestor had built.
Realising film’s ability to influence public opinion, the British started banning and censoring both Burmese and foreign movies early on. The Adventures of Kathlyn, a 1913 American movie serial about a woman lured from California to India and sold into slavery, was probably the first film banned in Burma. ‘You will see her bound by fanatical natives,’ went the advertising strapline, more than enough for its screening to be prohibited in 1914, the British not wanting the Burmese to get any ideas about tying up foreign women.
Censorship couldn’t stop films critical of the colonists from being made, though. In 1937, the revolutionary students at Rangoon University got their close-up when future prime minister U Nu wrote and directed Boycott. It starred Aung San and other young nationalists, outlining their reasons for launching yet another student strike the year before. A1 would later film Aung San’s speeches, which were then shown in cinemas.
Seventy years after U Nu’s foray into film-making documentarians began venturing onto the streets of Yangon again, only this time to capture the realities of life under the generals. Independent film-making was virtually unknown after the 1962 coup, and there is little footage of Burma from the military era shot without the regime’s approval, but a loose collective of budding film-makers set out to change that. ‘Under the junta documentaries were propaganda, or films about how to do things. But we wanted to show the lives of ordinary people,’ Thaiddhi, one of those young pioneers, told me.
Art, like politics and business, is often dynastic in Asia, where children are encouraged to follow in their relatives’ footsteps. Thaiddhi is no exception; the son of a well-known musician, his younger brother is the tattooed guitarist of one of Yangon’s top bands. But Thaiddhi, whose name comes from the Pali language, chose film as his medium, a much more risky endeavour than music when he started making documentaries in 2005. ‘We couldn’t shoot on the street, unless it was a location we knew with people we knew. If the police came, we’d tell them we were just practising how to use the camera.’
Sidestepping the censors was the aim of Thaiddhi and his contemporaries. ‘The Ministry of Information, which was really the Ministry of Propaganda, was responsible for censoring movies and TV. Film-makers had to submit scripts to get permission to shoot and the film had to be submitted again after it was edited. But we didn’t submit our films. We made our films illicitly, then sent them abroad to festivals or distributed them on DVDs. We were able to get around the censorship because documentary just wasn’t really a genre here.’
Prematurely plump like many Burmese men, thanks to a diet of oily curries and fried snacks, Thaiddhi chose to meet in a café close to the old Rangoon racecourse in Yankin, the township where he grew up. He was modest about his work, deflecting my suggestion that it took courage to refuse to play by the junta’s rules. ‘We were afraid of them, for sure. I was born in 1983, so I was five when 1988 happened. I grew up with the fear. We knew people could get arrested and imprisoned,’ he said.
Over coffee and pastries Thaiddhi explained how he and a handful of other young film-makers reinvented the art of the documentary in Burma. In doing so they compensated partially for the lack of an independent press. Their films, and the documentaries being made today, cover contentious topics – land confiscations, environmental causes, feminist and LBGT issues, access to education and healthcare – that are still largely ignored by the local media. That is partly out of fear of government reprisals, but also because a free press is still a new concept in Burma.
‘We didn’t do overtly political films in the beginning. It was more subtle than that. We wanted to hold up a mirror so we could reflect our society. We’d do a day in the life of an artist who had been in jail for supporting the NLD or people in an old-age home. It was quite gentle at first,’ Thaiddhi recalled. ‘But when you’re making documentaries, you’re dealing with truth and reality and that was sensitive for the authorities. Under the junta you couldn’t show poverty, like a village of bamboo shacks, in mainstream movies. But we did.’
Soon they began to understand the potential of documentaries to achieve what other media couldn’t in Burma. ‘We realised we could tell stories like a feature film does, but they would be stories about ordinary people and their lives,’ said Thaiddhi. ‘We could show re
al life in a way the movies couldn’t, because they were so heavily censored. And once you do that, politics is automatically involved.’
Their early experiences would coalesce in 2008 when they started shooting what would become a feature-length documentary about the immediate aftermath of Cyclone Nargis. ‘Nargis is one of the most important events in our recent history,’ said Thaiddhi. ‘So many people died, but the junta only cared about pushing through the new constitution right after it. And it came soon after the Saffron Revolution, when lots of activists were in prison, so it was a key moment for the country.’
Footage of the Saffron Revolution, shot secretly and smuggled out of Burma, had embarrassed the junta. Thaiddhi and his colleagues would shame the generals further by journeying into the Ayeyarwady Delta, which bore the brunt of the destruction when Nargis made landfall in May 2008. ‘Nargis hit Yangon hard too. The whole city looked like a war zone, trees down everywhere. Then my journalist friends told me it was worse in the Delta. So we decided to make a film. Two of us accompanied a family going to check on their relatives in Bogale Township,’ he remembered.
With the junta providing no assistance to Nargis’s victims and initially refusing to allow international aid into the country, many people started making trips to the Delta with donations of food and supplies. Thaiddhi and two other cameramen made repeated visits with some of them, filming as they went. ‘We stayed in what was left of the villages with the victims. They helped us so much, hiding us when the army finally showed up. They were very unhappy with the government because they’d had no help and wanted their stories told.’
Having accumulated seventy hours of footage, the decision was made to edit the film outside Burma, well away from the eyes of regime spies. ‘We sneaked the footage out to Hamburg,’ said Thaiddhi. ‘We were going to premiere it at Amsterdam’s film festival, which is the biggest in the world for documentaries, but then one of the other cameramen and an editor were arrested back in Yangon, not for making the film but for their part in the Saffron Revolution. They were detained for forty-five days. We freaked out and put false names on the credits.’
Nargis: When Time Stopped Breathing introduced the new documentarians of Burma to the outside world. The film is raw and rain-soaked. There is no commentary, the story of Nargis is told in the voices of the victims, still in shock and left to fend for themselves in a flooded, flattened landscape. The documentary was acclaimed at film festivals in Europe and Asia throughout 2010, but there was no chance of it being shown in Burma while the junta was still in power.
Only in 2012, after the generals had stepped down, was it screened in Yangon. ‘It was a test of the new government, and we put our real names on it,’ said Thaiddhi. But Nargis has still never been broadcast on any of Burma’s television channels. ‘We’ve tried to get our films on television here but so far it hasn’t happened. They’re too scared to show them right now,’ Thaiddhi said. Documentaries are shown only at one-off screenings in Yangon or on the Democratic Voice of Burma television station, which was based overseas until recently.
Such self-censorship is a hangover from the junta era, when films were scrutinised by a board that included representatives of the Tatmadaw and the Ministry of Religious Affairs and Culture. Those censors continue to operate under Daw Suu’s government. Documentaries with LBGT themes, which focus on ethnic minority issues, or are considered too overt in their portrayal of sexuality, have all been banned since the NLD won the 2015 election.
‘We’re still fighting for the censorship to end. I know a lot of NLD people and I am constantly lobbying them for it to go. Censorship looks ugly in a democratic country,’ said Thaiddhi. He was wary, though, of heaping any more criticism onto Daw Suu. ‘She gets the blame for the army’s actions. It’s a really tough game for her,’ he emphasised. ‘As a film-maker, I am lucky to be living and working in these times. But it’s not realistic at the moment to be attacking the government.’
Media ownership in Burma is concentrated in the hands of very few people, too, all with links to the former junta, further limiting the chances of controversial films being broadcast. ‘The thing about television here is that the channels are owned by cronies, ex-generals or the sons of ex-generals. It’s the same with radio, and television and radio are the two most powerful mediums in this country,’ said Lamin Oo, one of the film-makers who emerged in the wake of Thaiddhi’s generation. ‘People think television is free because they can watch Myanmar Idol, but they don’t show documentaries or independent news.’
Challenging that monopoly is still too risky for the new documentarians. ‘I’d get into trouble if I made a film describing how television channels are owned by cronies. It’s easier to interview ordinary people than it is to expose establishment figures,’ said Lamin Oo. ‘I think it is always in the back of your mind whether or not a subject is too controversial. We still can’t make films about the Rohingya or Buddhist extremists, or which are critical of the government. It’s not just the authorities, but the backlash we’d get on social media as well.’
Despite these limitations the number of documentaries being made continues to rise. They are much cheaper to shoot than movies and there are more and more film-makers who view them as a way of combining reportage with art, no matter what the government might say. ‘When I started making films I was worried about what the authorities would think. Now I don’t care,’ said Shunn Lei, a 27-year-old director. ‘I used footage of police beating women who had lost their land. The censors wanted me to cut that. I refused, so my film wasn’t allowed to be screened.’
Shunn Lei is one of an increasing number of female film-makers who have graduated from Burma’s sole film school in the last few years. Like my friend Thida, she spurns thanaka and the htamein, preferring jeans and t-shirts which reveal a couple of tattoos. For Shunn Lei documentaries are a means of questioning the prevailing male orthodoxy in Burma. ‘I’m interested in women’s rights and I thought film would allow me to inform people in a beautiful way,’ she told me in her office in downtown Yangon.
Raising awareness of sexual harassment and violence, under-discussed and little reported in Burma, is one of Shunn Lei’s principal goals. ‘It’s a real issue for women,’ she pointed out. ‘Even if you get a taxi in Yangon, you can get hassled. If you walk to work, or get the bus, molesting and catcalling is commonplace. Men are never taught that it is wrong. But women are always being told how to avoid harassment. That’s victim blaming.’
Commentators in the colonial period were struck by how women in Burma appeared to be more liberated than elsewhere. James George Scott, the most noted of the early foreign interpreters of Burmese society, thought they enjoyed greater legal rights than their contemporaries in Europe. He cited how they retained any property they owned after marriage and kept it if they divorced. Henry Fielding-Hall, who wrote about his experiences in late nineteenth-century Burma in The Soul of a People, regarded the local females as ‘the freest in the world’.
Today many would disagree with that. ‘Burma is a very patriarchal place. I don’t think it is true that women here have the same rights as men. People say, “Women have legal rights.” But there are cultural limitations. There’s sexist language. It is the way people believe women are born subordinate to men. That’s why we need feminism in Burma. A Burmese feminism specifically for all women in the country,’ said Shunn Lei.
Like other local feminists Shunn Lei does not look to Aung San Suu Kyi for inspiration. Since becoming Burma’s leader she has spoken out on gender discrimination and the need to promote women’s rights. But even though around one third of the NLD’s MPs are female, Daw Suu didn’t appoint any of them to her cabinet. And of the fourteen states and regions in Burma, only two have female chief ministers.
‘Most people don’t think of her as a woman. They think of her as Aung San’s daughter,’ noted Shunn Lei. ‘He died when she was two, but no one ever talks about the role of her mother in raising her. That doesn’t mean we don’t ad
mire her. We do. But she is a special, privileged case and definitely not a role model for rural women. She’s an example of how our identities are defined by our fathers, husbands and work places. Never by us.’
As well as making documentaries Shunn Lei has co-founded a magazine discussing feminist issues, and organises workshops around the country introducing women to the idea of genuine equal rights. But she admits promoting feminism is a struggle. ‘Most people in Burma, even educated ones, think it is a dirty word. Even men of my age think feminism means man-hating, which it isn’t. They don’t think of it as gender equality or empowerment. They think you’re challenging the established system.’
That, though, is exactly what she and the other feminists in Burma are doing, just as the Rangoon University students of the 1930s confronted the colonial state. ‘We are questioning the whole power structure in our country, so we are kind of revolutionary. It is revolutionary to be a feminist here. There is an element of the “oppressed and oppressors”. But I don’t think all men are oppressors,’ said Shunn Lei.
Buddhism has played its part in entrenching the notion of male superiority over women. Despite Henry Fielding-Hall’s extravagant claims about the independence enjoyed by Burmese women, he noted also that Buddhism places a lower value on females than men. The most senior nun in Burma is still regarded as subordinate to any ten-year-old novice monk, while women are barred from some of the most sacred Buddhist sites or confined to separate areas from men.