Secret film reveals isolated Burma Country scarred by poverty and military rule

   

Monday, March 19, 2012    ... 

A secret film made by an American professor has revealed the truth about daily life in Burma, scarred by grinding poverty and decades of military rule.

Scenes of daily life depicted in the film They Call It Myanmar: Lifting The Curtain.

 

Robert Lieberman went to Burma, also known as Myanmar, to train local film-makers and shot his own secret documentary, They Call It Myanmar: Lifting The Curtain, which lifts the lid off life in what has long been one of world’s most isolated and repressed nations.

The film, showing at selected US cinemas, is a reminder that, despite recent upbeat news as Burma ventures on a reform path that has seen releases of political prisoners and easing of censorship, it remains a country with huge problems.

He takes in the historical treasures of the country but the abiding theme, however, is deprivation

Prof. Lieberman, 71, took time off from teaching physics at Cornell University, New York and travelled to Burma several times over two years, initially on a US government-funded Fulbright programme.

Part-documentary, part-travelogue, They Call It Myanmar absorbs the country’s charms and cruelties and spills them out withdisarming curiosity.

Prof. Lieberman 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.

He made the film 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 and its turbulent history are part of the narrative. Prof. Lieberman describes Burma 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.

Many faces populate Prof. Lieberman's film. They are on the street, on trains, in temples, in markets and clinics, though some are blurred to protect their identities.

The videography is often rough and ready but sometimes scenic. He takes in the historical treasures of the country but the abiding theme, however, is deprivation. 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, Prof. Lieberman looks at Burma’s turbulent modern history. There is rare archive footage of Ms Suu Kyi's father, national hero Aung San, speaking during a visit to Britain before he led the country towards 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 Ms Suu Kyi was catapulted to political prominence following a brutal military crackdown on democracy protesters in 1988.

http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20120319/arts-entertainment/Secret-film-reveals-isolated-Burma.411739