Language: Burmese with English subtitles
In February of 2021 a video clip of a Myanmar woman, clad in fluorescent green and black gym clothes and performing aerobics to loud gym music, went viral. A mundane-seeming workout routine, it also captured something crucial while relaying it to the world – a military coup underway in Myanmar. What made the video also shocking was that the woman was oblivious to the military coup taking place right in the background when black army trucks rushed into the capitol complex in Naypyitaw.
But life under a military regime, something the people of Myanmar have been subjected to before, is not a song and dance routine. The oppressed Myanmar people are using social media and live streaming to part the smokescreen and provide a glimpse of the brutalities to which the military regime is subjecting its own population. Myanmar Diaries, a hybrid documentary shot and created by an anonymous collective of filmmakers and ordinary citizens, premiered in the Panorama section of the 2022 Berlinale and aims to bring some of those distressing vignettes to the world.
“The mainstream media outlets have a short attention span because they’re constantly after the next breaking news,” the prime director of the collective, amply hiding his identity with masks and sunglasses, appeared in person and told the audience at the screening in Berlin. “We needed to create something that would make them stay on the topic and also as a way to honour the protestors of the civil disobedience movement in Myanmar,” he added.
The result is a heartbreaking portrayal of a country and its population slowly being brutalised to death by the military junta and usurped by the prison system in the country. The film consists largely of mobile phone clips of protests, interspersed with short films by ten young anonymous Burmese filmmakers.
Myanmar Diaries opens with protest calls of, “we want democracy,” reverberating in the background and takes the viewers into the confines of an apartment whose balcony is framed by a mango tree in the background with crows lingering about. While it’s largely a fight about human survival, little glimpses of animals – cats, dogs, and birds – create an atmosphere that wants to remind the viewer of a semblance of normalcy.
“Life still persists in the middle of the protests and atrocities. That’s the motivation behind our decision to show animals to insist that life exists on the periphery,” the anonymous director stated.
There are visuals of an older woman shouting, “we don’t want dictators,” and beseeching the militia in army vehicles to think thoroughly before they blindly obey the orders of the junta. “You were all educated once but now your education is useless,” she tells them. Children scream at the militia that had arrived at their doorsteps to not take their mother away and in one extremely harrowing case, a cellphone video of army men wantonly shooting into a flat to arrest a man who refuses to surrender.
The film chronicles how, as the civil disobedience movement took wings, the junta tightened the screws on individual freedoms and employed devious methods to quell the protests. One included sending plain clothed thugs into protests and beating protestors grievously. A mobile phone video, shot from across a street where a man was almost beaten to death during the protests by plain clothed men with iron rods, attests to this.
While away from the streets and its protests, another form of resistance takes hold. A man, growingly ostracised by the community because he works for the government, decides to quit, and join the civil disobedience movement. In another short film, a young woman recently finds out she’s pregnant, desperately seeks abortion pills on Facebook and hesitates to tell her boyfriend who is caught in the increasingly dangerous resistance movement.
Another way the people of Myanmar tried to stay alert and attract the community’s attention has been by banging their utensils and creating a cacophony, especially when unauthorised military arrests happened at nights. The film portrays jungle camps, by now so many of them have sprouted in the dense jungles of Myanmar, and the gorilla training happening in them.
Can resistance succeed, especially in the face of an all-pervasive cyber-surveillance used by the junta to oppress its own people? Can punishing international sanctions work with a cruel regime when the effects of those sanctions directly affect the people of Myanmar who are already desperately poor? As long as the struggle is ongoing, even as the world watches helplessly, there may be no answers to these questions.
The picture Myanmar Diaries paints is a stark one. The additional burden of resistance in the form of democratic protests while enduring crushing poverty is the reality of Myanmar’s people and Myanmar Diaries wants the world to know that there doesn’t seem to be an immediate end to that suffering.
Rating: * * * *
Prathap Nair is an independent culture features writer based in Germany.
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