Burma VJ

Voices are heard loudly in "Burma''

June 19, 2009|Ty Burr, Globe Staff

To watch the riveting documentary “Burma VJ’’ at the precise moment when the upheaval over Iran’s election is playing out in the news is a giddy, distressing deja vu experience. Here’s a film about the late-summer 2007 uprisings in Myanmar, one of the most brutally controlled countries on the planet, cobbled together from video and cellphone camera footage, tape recordings, and phone calls. The movie presents reportage as de facto resistance, bearing witness as an act of insurrection. The generals who rule the country share this view: If you are seen videotaping on the streets of Rangoon, you will disappear.

“Burma VJ’’ comes from the Dutch filmmaker Anders Ostergaard, but its subjects are the journalists of the Democratic Voice of Burma, anonymous local heroes whose faces we never seen for obvious fear of reprisals. “Joshua’’ is their leader, narrating the film in accented English and patiently re-creating the days and weeks during which he and his colleagues surreptitiously filmed the unrest. Their footage - a virus of dissent - replicated throughout the Internet, eventually popping out into the light of global media outlets like CNN and the BBC.

The events began with the Myanmar government doubling the price of gasoline overnight in August 2007, which led to sporadic protests that coalesced when the nation’s Buddhist monks decided to march en masse. Burma may be run by the military but culturally it’s a theocracy, and you do not mess with the monks. In their wake, emboldened, came the students, then the moderates, then everyone. Within days the streets of Rangoon were filled and the generals were faced with their fiercest popular resistance since 1988. Their worst fear seemed close to being realized: that the protesters would connect with activist Aung San Suu Kyi, an unseen and hugely potent figure after her 1990 election and subsequent years of house arrest.

In 1988, the tanks eventually came out and as many as 3,000 people were killed. The 2007 footage is astounding and inspiring but also unbearably suspenseful, because everyone’s waiting for the other boot to drop. At the same time the sheer numbers of the protesters is cause for elation, proof that the people’s will hasn’t been snuffed out in 40 years of dictatorship. “So many, so many. . .,’’ we hear a nearby voice murmur at one of the rallies, and it’s as if the national secret is out: We despise this life.