After Art & Copy, I dashed down the hallway of the Holiday Village to go see a documentary about media of a very different sort. Anders Østergaard’s Burma VJ is about the Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB), an underground network of videographers dedicated to reporting news from one of the most closed countries in the world.
The film won the Joris Ivens Prize at the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) 2008 and was acquired by HBO for broadcast in 2010, but if you’re lucky, you’ll be able to catch this powerful film on a big screen sometime before then.
Østergaard’s film is told through “Joshua,” a 27 year-old video journalist whose real identity is kept secret for security reasons. Originally, Østergaard set out to make a more modest film about the lives of the secret reporters but in the midst of shooting the doc, Burma's Buddhist monks rebelled against the country's ruling military junta, providing the filmmaker with a much larger story to tell.
Joshua is forced to flee to Thailand, where he takes on a tactical role for the DVB, coordinating the VJs efforts with those of the monks. The film uses both original footage shot by the DVB and reconstructed scenes to convey the events of September 2007 in Burma. With the foreign media shut out and Internet connections severed, the VJ's footage is the only record of the uprising that made it out to the rest of the world.
Joshua’s face is never shown on screen in the film, and at first I found this off-putting. Eventually, though, it enabled me to experience the events as he was experiencing them. Burma VJ does what a good documentary should – it puts the audience inside of a situation they would never have the opportunity to witness firsthand.
I’ll be talking with Anders later in the week about his film, so check back over the next several weeks for a more in-depth look at the film. Here's a look at the trailer.