Burma VJ: Reporting From A Closed Country (2009)

I think most people in this country, when they heard about the massive political protests in Myanmar, or Burma, back in September of 2007, probably had a reaction similar to mine: "Wow, that's cool."

And when we started getting scattered news reports here and there about the government crackdown on the protesters -- the raiding of monestaries, the beating up and murder of Buddhist monks and university students -- we had the opposite reaction: "Wow, that sucks."

But, because the Fall of 2007 was when Marion Jones had to give back her gold medals for doping, and that Polish guy in Canada died after he got tasered in the airport, and Benazir Bhutto returned to Pakistan after living in exile and promptly got shot, and suicide bombs were going off all over Iraq and Afghanistan ... well, we kind of forgot all about it. If someone mentioned it in a conversation, we probably all pulled some image that we had seen in a news report of some angry monk (like the one pictured above) or some army thugs marching down a city street out of the soup of our subconscious. But, I'd be willing to guess, that image and memory was probably pretty fleeting. And then we were on to whatever else we were thinking about that week.

I'm not trying to be some sort of self-righteous scold, wagging my finger and sniping about how Americans just don't really care about the rest of the world. I'm right there too. We do care, but -- like anyone -- we tend to think we have our own problems. And we did. Iraq and Afghanistan were both getting worse. The economy was starting to look a little rickety. There were the "will he or won't he" questions about whether Obama was going to throw his hat into the presidential ring. Dane Cook was wanting us to go see Good Luck Chuck. Most of us don't even really know where Burma is, or why those monks were so pissed off. So we moved on.

Part of the equation, I think, is the 24-hour cable news cycle. Turn on CNN at any time of day and they're probably gonna have some segment about some shit going down in some part of the world with palm trees and large, Socialist-style concrete buildings. Flip over to Fox and it'll be some pretty blond teenager missing in the Caribbean. It's hard to keep track of who's who and what's what and why we should worry about this story versus that story.

And -- and this may just be me -- if there is news footage available, I instinctually think, "well, it can't be that bad, can it?"

I mean, if they are letting reporters film it, then it's probably pretty contained. Right?

Right?

Wrong.

Of course, I know that. But without actually experiencing what it's like to be a reporter in harm's way, I tend to go to my default happy place and imagine all the shit I've seen in movies. Woody Harrelson in Welcome to Sarajevo. Sam Waterston in The Killing Fields. Handsome, rugged men in fishing vests, carrying large Betamax video cameras, standing in some dingy office while an Army Colonol who probably looks a lot like Craig T. Nelson pounds on his desk and yells at said ruggedly handsome man for making his job more difficult. Call it the Dan-Rather-in-khakhis effect.

The last thing I imagine is "Joshua."

Joshua is the faceless (and nameless) hero of Anders Ostergaard's new documentary Burma VJ: Reporting From A Closed Country. And when I say hero, that's exactly what I mean. Joshua calls himself a reporter, but what he really is is a revolutionary. A native of Burma, he is armed with a little handicam video camera that he has to hide in bags or tucked into the crook of his armpit. He has a network of similarly heroic Burmese "reporters" who do the same thing. They get footage -- ten seconds here, twenty seconds there -- of the myriad brutalities waged by the military junta (affixed with the painfully euphemistic moniker "State Peace and Development Council") that has controlled Burma with an iron fist for the last twenty-some years.

Joshua and his comrades smuggle the footage they can get out of the country, either to Thailand via courier or over the Internet, in the hopes that CNN or the BBC will air some of it and -- hopefully -- spark outrage around the world. They also use a television station in Scandanavia to beam the images back into Burma so the opressed population has an alternative to the state-controlled media that screams about "BBC sabateours!"

If they are caught, they face life in prison. Or death.

Ostergaard's documentary is comprised largely of this footage, and its cumulative power is devastating. Joshua's network happened to be on the ground during the September 2007 uprising (even though Joshua himself was forced to flee the country beforehand and was left to coordinate things from Thailand), and they captured it all in real time. The power of this movie -- much like The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, Kim Bartley and Donnacha O'Briain's 2002 documentary about the attempted coup against Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez -- comes largely from that feeling of watching history unfold right there in front of you. The Burma uprising (and the documentary) starts literally with one man standing on a street corner and holding up a sign before being whisked away by plainclothes military intelligence officers. It ends with hundreds of thousands of Burmese -- including thousands of Buddhist monks -- filling the streets, and the brutal government reprisals that eventually quashed it.

The movie is interesting in its depiction of life under a repressive government. We see hints of it here and there -- the fear in the eyes of Burmese citizens riding a bus, the sudden screeching public announcements that are periodically issued over loudspeakers -- but it's all under the surface, an almost invisible part of life. When the protests start, there is a stark matter-of-factness to them that is jarring and even a little alienating. But things eventually build to a feeling of near ecstasy when it seems that they might work, and then a sense of anger and terror when it becomes clear that "the generals" are having none of it.

It's not a spoiler to reveal that the end result of the uprising was failure, at least in the short term. Monks -- revered by Burmese society -- are brutalized and even killed. Students are beaten and shot. Joshua's "reporters" are taken into custody. But the movie leaves us with a queer feeling of optimism, as Joshua prepares -- undaunted -- to return to Burma and start from scratch. Right or wrong, naive or not, you can't help but feel that it's only a matter of time before he and others like him succeed.

If I have any complaint about this documentary, it's the same one I did with The Revolution Will Not Be Televised and other docs like it: the music. The power of the images and Joshua's voice-over are more than enough without the constant, ominous, and -- frankly -- manipulative thudding of the soundtrack.

But that's a minor quibble. This is one of those must-see documentaries that, if enough people see it, could lead to some real action. Whether that's the case or whether we all have another collective "wow, that sucks" moment remains to be seen.