Bravery Fills Secret Burmese Dispatches

Burma VJ (2008)

By A. O. SCOTT

(NYT) -Many of the images in “Burma VJ: Reporting From a Closed Country” are shaky and blurred, captured with video cameras small enough to be quickly concealed in circumstances of danger and chaos. The lack of cinematic polish emphasizes the urgency of these pictures and the bravery of the anonymous camera operators — “VJ” stands for “video journalists” — who risked their safety, their freedom and their lives to record popular protests against the military government of Myanmar and the regime’s brutal response.

Directed by Anders Ostergaard, a Danish filmmaker, this documentary is largely a collage of those clandestine videos, recorded in August and September 2007 and narrated by a Burmese pro-democracy activist known as Joshua, whose face and identity are shrouded for his own protection. Joshua and his colleagues are haunted by memories of the early 1990s, when the military junta known as Slorc (an acronym for the State Law and Order Restoration Council) responded to its electoral defeat by Aung San Suu Kyi by cracking down ruthlessly on the citizens of the country that nearly everyone in this film pointedly calls Burma, rather than the new name imposed on it by Slorc.

As public defiance of the regime grows through the late summer of 2007, Joshua hopes the result will be different. He is part of the Democratic Voice of Burma, a network of journalists who discreetly gathered information about Burmese life by interviewing ordinary people and recording their everyday activities. When small, apparently spontaneous demonstrations begin in the capital, the group’s cameras are there to witness the events, and as video circulates at home and abroad, the gatherings grow bigger and bolder.

Somewhat reluctantly, Joshua flees to Thailand, where, via cellphone and Internet, he receives firsthand reports and raw footage of a rapidly escalating movement. Myanmar’s normally quiescent Buddhist monks emerge as the symbolic and strategic linchpin of anti-government activity, and images of their defiance spread around the world in spite of the government’s ban on foreign journalists.

“Burma VJ” is a rich, thought-provoking film not only because of the story it tells, which is by turns inspiring and devastatingly sad, but also because of the perspective it offers on the role that new communications technologies can play in political change. The viral videos of the Democratic Voice of Burma are like the hidden printing presses of earlier underground revolutionary movements, except that the portability of the cameras and the ease of Web and satellite-based distribution make them harder to suppress.

But not impossible. While much of the film offers the stirring drama of a population shaking off passivity and fear and standing up to tyranny, the denouement shows that old-fashioned police-state repression can still overpower a rebellion fueled by new media. The cameras are on hand to record the eventual crackdown in horrific detail — there is something indelibly and uniquely appalling about the sight of soldiers firing on crowds of their fellow citizens — but they cannot alter the terrible course of events. And so the narrative of “Burma VJ” takes on a somber, elegiac cast, as the potential for freedom flares up and is, in short order, snuffed out.

The story is not over, of course, as a glance at recent headlines suggests. The cruelty and paranoia of the Myanmar government may yet be overcome by the patience and resilience of people like the brave and anonymous monks, students and office workers glimpsed in “Burma VJ.” But while the film refuses despair, it also declines to traffic in hopes that may prove, once again, illusory. Instead it tries, with a fascinating mixture of directness and sophistication, to tell the truth.

BURMA VJ

Reporting From a Closed Country

Opens on Wednesday in

Manhattan.

Directed by Anders Ostergaard; written by Mr. Ostergaard and Jan Krogsgaard; directors of photography, Simon Plum and Burmese video journalists; edited by Janus Billeskov Jansen and Thomas Papapetros; music by Conny Malmqvist; produced by Lise Lense-Moller; released by Oscilloscope Laboratories and HBO Documentary Films. At Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street, west of Avenue of the Americas, South Village. In English and Burmese, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. This film is not rated.