A still from the documentary Burma VJ shows monks who led the protest. Danish director Anders Ostergaard sorted through hours of handheld footage to tell the story of the Saffron Revolution. (Associated Press)For the young video journalists portrayed in the documentary Burma VJ: Reporting From a Closed Country, getting news out to the world is more important than their personal safety.
Throughout the 2007 protests led by peaceful monks, a network of young Burmese reporters armed with cameras shot footage of their fellow citizens standing up to a brutal military regime.
Danish filmmaker Anders Ostergaard was fortunate to have made contact with this network of reporters, called Democratic Voice of Burma, before the protests started.
His documentary Burma VJ opens in Toronto and Vancouver on Friday and will soon have commercial release in other Canadian cities.
Ang San Suu Kyi addresses supporters during the 2007 protests. (Burma VJ/Cooperative Films) Ostergaard's main contact was a man code-named "Joshua" who spent 2007 in a safe house in Thailand but played the critical role of relaying the footage out to international news organizations.
"Before the monks' protest, we had initiated a protest before that," Joshua said in an interview Thursday with CBC's Q cultural affairs show. "I was travelling Burma and realized that the movement was bigger and bigger.
"We were afraid it would be like in 1988, when the international community didn't see it."
Burmese agents everywhere
Joshua, who is still in hiding, said the Thai town where he was based during the protests was teeming with Burmese agents, and the camera operators on the streets were also at risk.
Foreign news crews were banned, the internet was shut down and Burma — also known as Myanmar — was closed to the outside world, but he was able to communicate with his VJs via clandestine phone calls.
"For me, it was really hard to be in the head office in Thailand, away from my people. I wanted to be with my camera on the streets of Rangoon while there are protests, but I had to do it because it was the assignment from my network," he said.
The footage was smuggled out of Burma, Joshua sent it to Norway and, from there, it was broadcast back to Burma and the world via satellite, boosting general awareness and outrage.
"It was an incredible coincidence that I was already working with these guys," Ostergaard told Q.
"I figured out after years of pondering how to make a film on Burma and … how really to get inside I discovered the phenomenon of the citizen journalist or the VJs inside the country."
Ostergaard sifted through hours of footage, some of it from shaky handheld cameras, to tell the story of the VJs and the Saffron Revolution.
Lacked resources
"It was an incredible achievement for these people who had so few resources. They only had money for the bus ticket .They even have to delete very important material because they run out of tape … but even so I still had hours of tape to choose from," he said.
Working with Joshua, he re-enacted many of the scenes in Thailand, including the phone conversations and assessments of their impact on google.
"The whole situation with Joshua in his safe house in Thailand ... even if we were able to follow these things as they were happening, it would have been a breach of security that we couldn't allow ourselves," Ostergaard said.
He admits he worried about exposing the people he was working with, both in 2007 and with the release of the film.
"It's kind of a chain of danger. I had my worries about what I exposed about the VJs and they had their concerns about the people on the streets, all these hundreds of thousands of faces they are exposing in the protests," he said.
Ostergaard quotes Ang San Suu Kyi, the leader of the opposition who has lived for years under house arrest in Rangoon.
"The great conclusion we have to have is something Ang San Suu Kyi herself said. She said, 'We must free ourselves from fear,' and that is the whole thing," he said.
The film was hailed at the Sundance Film Festival and had a prominent opening in London. It has also been smuggled into Burma, where Ostergaard said he hopes it is pirated to be seen by as many people as possible.
Joshua also is doing his best to get the film into his country.
"There are some people who died and some people are still in prison. And Ang San Suu Kyi is still in custody and the junta are still in power in Burma. At the same time, I find that a lot of people are more outspoken than before," he said.
Burma VJ (a 1 hour version) will air on the Passionate Eye on CBC Newsworld on Monday, September 28 at 10 p.m. ET/PT.
