A brave documentary on Burma

‘Aung Htun’, cameraman whose identity remains hidden

When the flashguns of the paparazzi begin their ritual popping outside the Kodak Theatre in Los Angeles on Sunday evening, one Oscar hopeful will be far away, forsaking the red carpet to preserve his anonymity and liberty.

Aung Htun – the name is an alias – shot much of the footage used in Burma VJ, a harrowing documentary that follows the attempts of a group of guerrilla journalists to record the pro-democracy demonstrations that shook Burma three years ago.

The film, which has been nominated in the Documentary Feature category, follows the work of the journalists of Democratic Voice of Burma, a non-profit radio and television station based in Norway, as they risk their freedom and their lives to let the world know of the bloodshed on the streets of Rangoon.

Anders Østergaard, the Danish director, started planning Burma VJ – the initials stand for Video Journalist – in 2005, long before the demonstrations, as a more intimate piece on the personal and professional challenges of reporting from a closed country. The core of the film is the grainy clandestine footage taken by the DVB journalists, given narrative drive by reconstructed telephone conversations between “Joshua”, a DVB editor/cameraman, and his team, trying to cover the news while playing a deadly game of hide-and-seek with the Burmese authorities.

The film has been a sleeper hit. Released in May 2009 at a single theatre in the US, it grossed just $5,554 its first weekend, but has gone on to win over 30 awards from, among others, the Sundance Film Festival (documentary film editing), to the Vaclav Havel Award in the Czech Republic’s One World Festival, and on through Berlin, London and Amsterdam.

Østergaard, a former journalist, says the film is a “creative documentary” and not straight journalism, and that his primary concern was to give an insight into the process.

The five cameramen and women who shot the footage that makes up Burma VJ remain in the shadows, knowing that if the Burmese authorities discover their identities they will be arrested and their families harassed by a regime that regards criticism as treason. Burma ranks 193 out of 195 countries in Freedom House’s Freedom of the Press rankings, only marginally ahead of North Korea.

Aung prefers to meet in anonymous public spaces and is vague about where he lives or works, although he now spends most of his time in neighbouring Thailand. Watching the film in a Bangkok apartment brings back memories he would rather forget.

“I see people I worked with and colleagues who are now in prison,” he says. “I had made up my mind that I could face torture, so I was prepared mentally,” he adds, but now when he watches his footage of troops opening fire on protesters, he goes quiet.

The problem lies not just in what he has seen, but his abiding guilt. He shot one of the most moving passages in the film, an interview with a group of bewildered young monks who had been beaten up in their monastery by government thugs the previous night.

“The monks are in prison because of the interview – I know why they are in prison, but they don’t know why,” he says.

There is also anger. He pauses the film at the point when the army starts arresting and beating up monks near the Shwedagon Pagoda, the holiest Buddhist shrine in Burma. “Look, no ambulances, just fire trucks, so they can wash away the blood on the streets when they are finished.”

It is not just the protesters who have been arrested: the generals who run Burma are even more keen to silence the messengers. Kenji Nagai, a Japanese cameraman, was shot and killed during the confrontation, but mostly the authorities rely on pliant courts to silence the media. At the latest count, 14 DVB journalists have been imprisoned in Burma, among the more than 2,100 political prisoners that Amnesty International estimates the regime is currently holding.

Hla Hla Min, 25, was arrested last year after shooting footage of monks intended for a story on the anniversary of the Saffron Revolution: she was sentenced to 26 years in prison under the catch-all Electronics Act, which makes it illegal to use the internet to send information overseas.

Because of such legislation, the challenges of getting the film’s footage and transmitting it to the outside world were more John le Carré than Fleet Street. Aung would shoot discreetly in the street before handing the tape to a runner at a secret rendezvous, who would then give it to a local organiser to decide whether to risk transmitting it immediately from an internet café or give it to a courier to take it out to Thailand.

Aung’s father was a civil servant and he grew up in a middle-class Rangoon suburb. “My family, my neighbours, they were all in favour of this movement,” he says of the drive towards greater democracy.

He joined the youth wing of the National League for Democracy, the opposition party led by Aung San Suu Kyi. Although he was too young to take part in the 1988 student rebellion, in which 3,000 people are estimated to have died, Aung remembers watching armoured personnel carriers grind past on their way to gun down the students.

No one knows how many were killed in the 2008 demonstrations, but most estimates say about 300. This time, though, it was the media that made the difference, says Aung.

“Compared to 1988, 2008 was much smaller but the impact was much greater. In 1988, it took two months for the news to get out. This time the world knew immediately; this time only a few were killed,” he says.

Aung is sceptical about the value of the elections scheduled for later this year, saying that they are unlikely to be free and fair and will merely serve to legitimise the regime’s power. And although he welcomes international re-engagement with the generals, led by the United States, he believes it is driven more by geopolitics – the proximity of China – than real concern for democratic change. That change will have to come from within, he believes, and not through blind confrontation.

“Anger can’t solve the problem, we have to find a way to use the anger to get a positive result.”

www.burmavjmovie.com

The 82nd Academy Awards take place on March 7, www.oscars.org