“Burma VJ” ““ the “VJ” standing for video journalists ““ shows both antigovernment protests and imprisonment of the press. It follows video journalists working for the OsloÂ-based media organization Democratic Voice of Burma during their reporting on the anti-government protests in September 2007.
The film centers on the leader of the Burmese journalists, who goes by the moniker Joshua to protect his identity, as he tries to assemble news footage from the protests to be smuggled out of Myanmar to Oslo. Footage was eventually broadcast from Norway and picked up by news outlets such as CNN and the BBC.
Barbara Gaerlan, the assistant director at the UCLA Center for Southeast Asian Studies, said she finds it is Joshua’s frantic aggregation of the video of multiple protests taking place simultaneously throughout the country that makes the work engaging as well as informative. The combination of these two qualities is what ultimately led Gaerlan to pick “Burma VJ” as the second film in the 2009-2010 film series.
“This is really the most powerful method to get people on campus educated about the challenge and complexity of the situation in Burma,” Gaerlan said.
Director Anders Østergaard had initially been introduced to Joshua through a filmmaking program that Joshua was taking as a student in Thailand. The director originally intended the film to be a short documentary on journalism in the country in general, focusing on Joshua. When the film was shot, however, an unplanned series of demonstrations by Burmese monks gave Østergaard and Joshua a chance to see the country’s military junta out on the streets in force.
Professor Gail Kligman, the creator of the film series, explains the importance of the film by saying that “Burma VJ” and the two other films in the series are meant to stimulate a broader on-campus interest in the international status of human rights.
“Being a large, public university in an internationally important city such as Los Angeles, we should be fostering an ongoing discussion about the situation of human rights globally,” Kligman said. “I want (the film series) to act as the focal point for the human rights discussion, but I also want this discussion to grow and don’t want to hold it just to whatever films are shown in the series.”
Spencer Kerrigan, screening commentator and executive director of Partners Relief and Development USA, a Burma-focused aid organization, emphasized that Burmese society suffers especially from human rights violation.
“People have no idea how oppressive (the military junta) really is and how pressing the need for action is,” Kerrigan said.
Indeed, multiple journalists were arrested for their participation in broadcasting from protest sites, and at least one, Ko Win Maw, is still imprisoned. The Web site for the film includes a link to an online petition for his and other political prisoners’ release.