After just seeing Anders Østergaard's Burma VJ, Reporting from a Closed Country at True/False, I've been trolling around the Internet reading other reviews as I'm wont to do when a film impresses the hell out of me. Not only impresses, but moves me deeply--as this fine piece of work certainly did. I'm far from the only one with praise for this prize-winning film, but I came across Andrew Marshall's review at Time.com and, frankly, it pissed me off.
Marshall, a reporter who covered Burma's tragic pro-democracy uprising for TIME magazine in 2007 (the central event of the film), recalls the stunning imagery that we see in Østergaard's film, monks holding their upside-down alms bowls high above their heads to indicate that they will not accept offerings from the military; the citizens marching in the streets beside them, many of them recording what was happening on cell phones and cameras. Some of those armed with cameras were undercover video journalists (VJs), working for the Oslo-based Democratic Voice of Burma. These images were transmitted out of the country via the Internet and across the globe through all the major media outlets, at great personal risk to the reporters and their families.
Østergaard reconstructs a meticulous aural dimension to the story to reflect the line of communication that helped coordinate this clandestine effort. The phone conversations are orchestrated between Joshua and the reporters on the ground during the uprising. Joshua is a 27-year-old journalist who has been fired from the Burmese government newspaper, and goes to work for the DVB from a safe house in Thailand. He is our narrator and our connection to these brave men and women who risk their lives to capture these images. He still resides in exile.
The footage of the crowded streets and packed rooftops and balconies where people chant "our cause, our cause!" over and over with raised fists is thrilling. Led by the monks in country-wide protests, ordinary citizens put themselves in the line of fire, all of them prepared to die, if necessary, for the freedom of their homeland.
With this phone communication used as the spine of the film, the filmmaker can also protect his subjects and make a "virtue out of necessity," as he puts it. For the protection of these people is utmost on his agenda and he spent a very, very long time trying to figure out how to tell this story and still protect them. He even expressed mixed emotions about the film's success, afraid that he would be exposing and calling attention to people who are still in hiding, and would be in a world of trouble if found. In his research, he used Google Earth to help construct the hundreds and hundreds of hours of unmarked, unidentified footage he had to sift through to simulate an accurate time line of this communication. Once he started to put that time line together, he says the film began "to speak" about the collective experience of what it must have looked and felt and sounded like. The soundtrack by Swedish composer, Conny C-A Malmqvist and sound design by Martin Hennel also help to establish a "here and now" immediacy and gives it a haunting lyricism that adds much to the experience. Through this rigorous process, the director has crafted a piece of cinema that transcends beyond this particular story, and speaks to the universal aspects of revolution from within. To my mind, the film is flawless in its execution.
Which begs the question, how the hell else would he have been able to do this without this reconstruction, this craft, this cinematic imperative to make the story come alive?
Yet Marshall is stuck on the d-word and the inherent "purity" of what he feels documentary should present. He wants to call it a "docudrama" which is a term I, personally, loathe since it smacks of those god-awful stilted recreations that I see all the time in stories of the "Wild West," or what have you. Some of the most highly regarded nonfiction films of this past year--Man on Wire, Waltz with Bashir, My Winnipeg, Up the Yangzte--are brilliant reconstructions of true stories. (My Winnipeg calls itself a docu-fantasia, for goodness' sakes.) Marshall feels that these dramatic reconstructions in Burma VJ are a "handicap, undermining the film's credibility and dishonoring the very profession its subjects risk their lives to pursue." This kind of statement makes me froth at the mouth, seriously. He then goes on to say that he soon began "to anxiously question the authenticity of every scene." Really? I thought you were there, dude.
But he is hung up on the semantics of what to label the film and that, my friends, is becoming mighty tiresome. "It is still hard to simply re-categorize Burma VJ as a well-made docudrama and leave it at that--not as long as its makers insist that it is a documentary [who's insisting anything?], or that it is composed largely of the work of undercover reporters, when at least half of it seems re-enacted [not seems, it is re-enacted, that's the whole damn point; no one's denying or hiding that]. The cause of Burma's democrats is ill-served by hyperbole [!] and the reconstruction of events to fit a version of the truth." So whose "version" should the filmmaker have told? Someone else's? I'm confused. Are we supposed to watch Joshua shrouded in shadow, sitting in a chair in a darkened room with his voice robotized talking directly to the director and telling us what happened? Would that fit a better "version of the truth"?
As our friend, Werner, has said, "Technology has a great advantage in that we are capable of creating dinosaurs and showing them on the screen even though they are extinct 65 million years. All of a sudden, we have a fantastic tool that is as good as dreams are." Or how about this one: "For such an advanced civilization as ours to be without images that are adequate to it is as serious a defect as being without memory." Østergaard's Burma VJ serves as a conduit to our universal memory. This is the magic of great cinema, no matter how it's constructed, no matter how it's labeled. Come join our advanced civilization, everyone!
Burma VJ is the recipient of True/False's True Life Fund. In 2009, the Fund hopes to raise $10,000 in aid of the DVB for equipment and other needs. Fund raising got started before the festival with local events in Columbia with the director making appearances at high schools and other local places to discuss the film with the community there. To learn more about the True Life Fund, click here.
And with that diatribe, I leave you to go on yet another journey to other far-away lands. I did see other films I'd like to talk about at T/F but that will have to wait for a later date. Tomorrow, I depart for Damascus, Syria (with a quick stop in Rome), where the second iteration of DOX BOX is taking place, as we speak. I will join them for their Open Day with industry professionals to share what's happening over here in terms of funds and festivals and to work with young filmmakers there in one-on-one consultancies where they will share treatments and pitches of their nonfiction projects. The festival is in Damascus from the 4th to the 11th and then will travel to Tartous and Homs. I will also be attending the festivities in Thessaloniki and I'm very excited about that, too. Look for my coverage on the IDA web site, here on SIM, and wherever else I can yak about docs. Or reconstructed realities.
Pamela: Many, many thanks for your eloquent support.
Anders Ostergaard
Posted by: Anders Ostergaard | March 07, 2009 at 01:03 PM
Great piece Pamela. "Docudrama" indeed. Marshall is just way off base and you've nailed it just right.
Posted by: Simon Kilmurry | March 07, 2009 at 12:20 AM