There are no credits at the beginning or at the end of this collection of short videos made by amateur and professional filmmakers in the aftermath of the coup in Myanmar that took place February 1, 2021. Obviously, they would be arrested if the authorities knew what they had done, but the Dutch producers who compiled, edited, and distributed the footage to the world in the form of a 70-minute documentary decided their own names weren’t important either. In “solidarity” with the Burmese contributors they remain anonymous as well. As a result, Myanmar Diaries comes as close as you’ll ever get to pure cinema.

Which may sound like an odd and irrelevant comment given the contents. A mixture of impressionistic staged dramas and actual live documents of demonstrations, arrests, and general chaos, the movie has an integrity that is almost impossible to describe. The movie opens with that famous video of a fitness instructor dancing to a techno track outdoors while, in the background, military vehicles proceed to the parliament to take it over. It sets the mood perfectly by juxtaposing a quotidian activity with an extraordinarily ominous one. Most of the dramatic sequences involve lovers or spouses whose lives have been torn asunder by the crackdown on freedom. Sometimes the lost lover is involved in demonstrations and just doesn’t come home; in one the boyfriend of a pregnant teenage girl has to go on the run when the authorities bust his underground pro-democracy group. In two of these sequence the left-behind lovers attempt suicide, and perhaps succeed. We never see faces in these dramatizations. One, in fact, only shows hands, but the story it tells is vivid and heart-breaking. Perhaps the most troubling video is about a man who works for the authorities and has come to wrestle with his conscience. Is the blood he washes from his hands allegorical? Is the bag he puts over his head a form of self-abnegation? In any event, his suffering is acutely felt.

However, the staged vignettes can’t compare viscerally with the documentary footage. We see plainclothes police thugs beating unarmed demonstrators literally to death. We see more than one arrest wherein family members plead with or attempt to cajole police into releasing their loved ones—the cry of a child to “let my mother go” as she’s dragged away by a particularly brutal officer gave me nightmares for a week. The longest sequence may be the movie’s most stirring: a 67-year-old woman walking up and down a line of police trucks yelling at the young soldiers to think of what they’re doing. “You could all be my sons!” she screams and puts herself at their mercy, though she isn’t going to go to whatever hell they dispatch her without emptying her soul first, and she has a lot on her mind. 

In Burmese. Now playing in Tokyo at Porepore Higashi Nakano (03-3371-0088).

Myanmar Diaries home page in Japanese

photo (c) The Myanmar Film Collective