US professor Robert Lieberman went to Myanmar to train local filmmakers and shot his own documentary on the sly. The solo-filmed They Call it Myanmar: Lifting the Curtain pries the lid off daily life in what has long been one of world’s most isolated and repressed places, examining its grinding poverty and tragic decades of military rule.
The film is a reminder that, despite recent upbeat news as Myanmar ventures on a reform path that has seen releases of political prisoners and easing of censorship, it remains a country with huge problems.
The movie is showing at selected theaters in the US.
Lieberman, 71, took time off from his regular job teaching physics at Cornell University and traveled to Myanmar several times over two years, initially on a US government-funded Fulbright program. He helped shoot health awareness commercials, then taught film at a university in the main city, Yangon. He also accumulated 120 hours of his own footage, often filmed clandestinely.
Part documentary, part travelogue, They Call it Myanmar absorbs the country’s charms and cruelties and spills them out with disarming curiosity. He explains, both from his own perspective and the narrations by anonymous collaborators, just what life is like there and what makes its long-suffering people tick.
In a sense, the film is already outdated. Lieberman did the leg work before change began taking hold, although he sneaked back early last year to interview democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi after she was released from her latest stretch of house arrest.
The Nobel laureate’s musings on the country also known as Burma, and its turbulent history, are part of the narrative.
Lieberman describes Myanmar as the second-most isolated country in the world after North Korea, but foreign journalists are now being allowed in to report, and there is public debate on issues such as human rights and ethnic conflict that just a year ago would have been off-limits.
While the isolation and climate of fear has eased, however, that has not translated yet into a shift in political power or improved living conditions. Lieberman’s film lays bare how far what was once one of Southeast Asia’s most prosperous countries has sunk.
His starting point is not the ruinous military rule that has led it to that point, but, refreshingly, something more simple and vital to Burmese identity: tanaka, a fragrant, light brown paste that people daub on their faces. Opening the movie that way makes sense, as many faces populate Lieberman’s film. They are filmed on the street, on trains, in temples, in markets and clinics, though some are blurred out to protect their identities.
He sometimes injects his own dashes of humor, like when he jokes on seeing a Buddha image covered thick with countless offerings of gold leaf: “Shall we grab it and run?”
The abiding theme, however, is deprivation. In one hard-to-watch scene, a young, shaven-headed girl with a deep ulcer cries in pain at an ill-equipped clinic. The doctor says the girl has tuberculosis, but her mother cannot afford the drugs to treat her.
A political prisoner, interviewed off-camera, tells how he was tortured by his jailers, who put a bag on his head with two mice inside. He says to stop the mice biting him, he had to bite them back.
In the second half of the film, Lieberman looks at Myanmar’s turbulent modern history. There is rare archive footage of Aung San Suu Kyi’s father, national hero General Aung San, speaking during a visit to Britain before he led the country toward independence after World War II, only to be assassinated months before it shook off its colony status.
The film then tells the compelling story of how Aung San Suu Kyi was catapulted to political prominence following a brutal military crackdown on democracy protesters in 1988. The military used deadly force again to put down Buddhist monk-led mass demonstrations in 2007. The junta’s reputation was sullied further by its initial refusal to allow in foreign aid after Cyclone Nargis in 2008, which killed 130,000 people.
However, what is missing from They Call It Myanmar is what beckons now. Even hardened human rights activists and dissidents view the changes of the past year as the country’s most significant in the half-century since the military took power.
The film’s touching closing sequences tell of people’s aspirations. One Burmese tearfully speaks of how Myanmar is a proud country, but one that needs help to stand on its own feet. Another simply yearns “to speak, read and write poetry the way your heart tells you to do it.”
CONFRONTATION: The water cannon attack was the second this month on the Philippine supply boat ‘Unaizah May 4,’ after an incident on March 5 The China Coast Guard yesterday morning blocked a Philippine supply vessel and damaged it with water cannons near a reef off the Southeast Asian country, the Philippines said. The Philippine military released video of what it said was a nearly hour-long attack off the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) in the contested South China Sea, where Chinese ships have unleashed water cannons and collided with Philippine vessels in similar standoffs in the past few months. The China Coast Guard and other vessels “once again harassed, blocked, deployed water cannons, and executed dangerous maneuvers” against a routine rotation and resupply mission to
GLOBAL COMBAT AIR PROGRAM: The potential purchasers would be limited to the 15 nations with which Tokyo has signed defense partnership and equipment transfer deals Japan’s Cabinet yesterday approved a plan to sell future next-generation fighter jets that it is developing with the UK and Italy to other nations, in the latest move away from the country’s post-World War II pacifist principles. The contentious decision to allow international arms sales is expected to help secure Japan’s role in the joint fighter jet project, and is part of a move to build up the Japanese arms industry and bolster its role in global security. The Cabinet also endorsed a revision to Japan’s arms equipment and technology transfer guidelines to allow coproduced lethal weapons to be sold to nations
‘POLITICAL EARTHQUAKE’: Leo Varadkar said he was ‘no longer the best person’ to lead the nation and was stepping down for political, as well as personal, reasons Leo Varadkar on Wednesday announced that he was stepping down as Ireland’s prime minister and leader of the Fine Gael party in the governing coalition, citing “personal and political” reasons. Pundits called the surprise move, just 10 weeks before Ireland holds European Parliament and local elections, a “political earthquake.” A general election has to be held within a year. Irish Deputy Prime Minister Micheal Martin, leader of Fianna Fail, the main coalition partner, said Varadkar’s announcement was “unexpected,” but added that he expected the government to run its full term. An emotional Varadkar, who is in his second stint as prime minister and at
Thousands of devotees, some in a state of trance, gathered at a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Bangkok renowned for sacred tattoos known as Sak Yant, paying their respects to a revered monk who mastered the practice and seeking purification. The gathering at Wat Bang Phra Buddhist temple is part of a Thai Wai Khru ritual in which devotees pay homage to Luang Phor Pern, the temple’s formal abbot, who died in 2002. He had a reputation for refining and popularizing the temple’s Sak Yant tattoo style. The idea that tattoos confer magical powers has existed in many parts of Asia