HOT DOCS 2009: Those Pesky Recreations of BURMA VJ

There is no question that, if we are to judge by festival juries alone, Anders Østergaard’s BURMA VJ is the most acclaimed film of the last six months.  Beginning with its back-to-back jury wins at Copenhagen and IDFA, followed in January by the Editing Prize at Sundance and, finally, the Grand Jury Prize at Full Frame.  HBO acquired the rights to the film just before Sundance and Oscilloscope will be releasing the film this month, with a kick off at NYC’s Film Forum.

I was both early and late to the BURMA VJ party.  The first night of my arrival in Copenhagen, I was sitting in the hotel lobby drinking wine with other attendees when Matt Dentler told me that there was a film that everyone was talking about, the film of the festival.  So I wasn’t surprised to hear BURMA VJ called out twice as a winner a couple of nights later at the awards ceremonies.

But I didn’t get a chance to see BURMA VJ at Copenhagen, nor at Sundance, nor at True/False, nor at SXSW (our colleague Nathan Truesdell wrote about the film last month), so when I finally grabbed my seat at the Bloor Cinema in Toronto the other night, I had high expectations.  Very high.  Maybe too high.

For those that don’t know, BURMA VJ is the story of the DVB, the Democratic Voice of Burma, a group of courageous activist/revolutionaries who covertly videotape goings-on inside their oppressive regime, often capturing solitary acts of protest, which they are able to smuggle out of the country to the world's media, who are not allowed inside the country.  The DVB are the only information source for the world at large – and for citizens of Burma who have internet connections or satellite TV.

The film opens in August 2007, as rising fuel prices begin to cause outrage amongst the people and a group of Buddhist monks begin to lead larger-by-the-day protests in the streets of Rangoon.  The DVB is there to record the images and get them to the BBC and CNN and other world news outlets, each undercover videographer operating at great personal risk.

The film has already reminded us of Burma’s bloody past – an uprising in 1988 and subsequent governmental crackdown resulted in the deaths of 3000 protesters.  Now, nearly 20 years later, every march led by the monks - assumed to be protected by tradition that monks wouldn't be harmed - taunts the military junta to respond, and as each day passes, the possibility of a violent and bloody clash increases.

All of this kept me on the edge of my seat, both fearing that I would be witness to atrocities and hoping that somehow, this monk-powered revolt would, somehow, succeed.  There is no question that the raw, shaky, handycam-style video, sometimes only able to pop up for a moment from its hiding place, is wrenching, inspiring, everything a filmmaker would hope for from acquired video.

Around this video, however, director Østergaard has created a framing device that is largely, if not entirely, re-created.  He lets you know from the opening frame that this is coming, disclosing that events have been recreated using, whenever possible, the original participants.  Longtime (or even occasional) readers of this blog know that I have no problem with recreations – and I don’t have a hard and fast rule about announcing their presence to your audience.  But, for me, every time the film cut away from the action on the streets, to the silhouetted figure of “Joshua” (the DVB member who is coordinating the videographers via cell phone and computer) or a close up of his vibrating cell phone, I was driven to distraction.  There was, for me, something about these staged scenes that rang false, and that inauthenticity drew my attention toward the recreated phone and IM conversations.  Set against this all-too-real verite journalism, the acted-out scenes felt like a separate film.

And somewhere in there, when I should have been focused on the unfolding drama on the streets of Rangoon, I started thinking about AMERICAN TEEN.  That film also featured re-created or re-purposed phone conversations and text messages – which created a fairly huge controversy within the doc world last year.  There are still tales of AMERICAN TEEN’s Full Frame screening and the outrage that followed, with numerous souls in the audience asking why that film was playing at a documentary festival. 

Now, no one to my knowledge has alleged that TEEN director Nanette Burstein created any fictions, no one is saying that the phone and IM conversations didn’t happen.

So why did that film make such waves in Durham while BURMA VJ takes the Grand Jury Prize one year later?  Was it the disclaimer at the top?  Was it Burstein’s steadfast refusal that she hadn’t used recreations (she argued that footage was re-purposed)?  Is it because BURMA is a human rights epic and TEEN was “just” about a bunch of high school students?

I don’t doubt that BURMA VJ will be a hit with film critics as it has been with festival juries, and will likely be a big contender in the year-end awards derby.  And, even with my distractions, I still left that screening at Hot Docs with – I think – the emotions that the filmmaker wanted his audience to have. 

But I went into BURMA VJ, expectations high, hoping to see a perfect film.  Maybe I should have just been hoping for a good one.

Comments

[Steven Bognar]

AJ thanks for your thoughts on BURMA VJ, though I'm sorry to hear you fell out of the film during the recreations. In my book, the construction and visualization of those recreated scenes is beautifully, cinematically rendered, and fits incredibly well with the real footage - organic, in harmony. And even better, we could easily tell what was recreated and what wasn't. (Assume the audio of every phone call is also a recreation, just to be safe). The "recreations" in American Teen were harder to discern - they were more integrated into the verite scenes, and maybe that's what upset the purists.

[Pat Aufderheide]

I appreciate the thoughtful reaction to Burma VJ. My concern about the film was different. I felt that a key element of the real life story was the fact that Scandinavian government overseas aid money had paid for the "Joshua" figure, enabling the grassroots communication system. I only learned this from the filmmaker's remarks at IDFA. I think leaving out information such as this obscures the actual relationships that make things happen. For instance, in Legacy, Todd Lending's moving film (shown on HBO) about a poor African-American family in Chicago, I believe that the filmmaker's role in wangling access to a drug treatment program for one of the subjects is not mentioned, nor is a sizeable personal donation (from someone else) that enabled the family's making of a down payment on a house. These might be seen as blurring an otherwise uplifting story about self-help, but even if complicating these are highly relevant and informative pieces of information about the importance of intervention and the difficulties facing people without access to capital or connections.

[Stephen Hyde]

AJ, I was there at the Bloor amongst the smell of burning popcorn and sweaty Canadians.

Burma VJ has three important things going for it. It has extraordinary "access" and contemporary "relevance". The film makes the unseen visible, in turn creating a open window into the closed world of Militarized Myanmar.