Of the five films nominated in the Documentary Feature category, you could say that “Burma VJ” is the most democratic. The bulk of its footage was shot not by professional cameramen working for director Anders Ostergaard and producer Lise Lense-Moller, but by “citizen journalists” – amateurs trained by the Democratic Voice of Burma TV network to surreptitiously shoot video and smuggle it out of the country, which is ruled by a military junta that stifles dissent and has tried to isolate the country from the rest of the world.
Painstakingly pieced together from pieces of film shot on small cameras and sometimes on cell phones, the film tells the story of an uprising that swept the country in September 2007; led by the country’s Buddhist monks, students and others took to the streets for days of protest that were finally quelled by military force, and by the beatings, arrests and killings of monks. U Gawsita, one of the monks who appears in the film leading some of the protests (with megaphone in photo below), later fled the country and now lives in upstate New York; he accompanied the Danish filmmakers on a recent trip to Los Angeles that included the Oscar Nominees Luncheon.
How did the project come about?
LISE LENSE-MOLLER: It started in about 2004, when I was wondering, how did this country disappear from global consciousness? I wanted to do something about the government, and how they repressed the country so much that it disappeared. And then the Democratic Voice of Burma, which was a radio project, got seed money to do something with television. And that gave us an opportunity to get footage of the uprising from inside Burma, via the journalists they were training.
LISE LENSE-MOLLER: It started in about 2004, when I was wondering, how did this country disappear from global consciousness? I wanted to do something about the government, and how they repressed the country so much that it disappeared. And then the Democratic Voice of Burma, which was a radio project, got seed money to do something with television. And that gave us an opportunity to get footage of the uprising from inside Burma, via the journalists they were training.
They’d film for a few minutes and then take the tape out of the camera and give it to somebody else to upload or smuggle out of the country, so nobody had an overview of what existed. The uprising was in September 2007, and right after that we had less than two hours of footage, some that had been shown on CNN and the BBC. But the bulk of the footage didn’t surface until half a year later. By the end of May 2008, we had about 60 hours.
It must have been difficult to assemble into a coherent story.
ANDERS OSTERGAARD: Yeah, obviously it took a little while. And also, it was hard to find the right balance, because you could easily get lost in all this amazing material. It was all from people who were ad-libbing on their own, because there was nobody telling them what to shoot. And that was an awkward feeling, to administer material that you had no influence on whatsoever.
ANDERS OSTERGAARD: Yeah, obviously it took a little while. And also, it was hard to find the right balance, because you could easily get lost in all this amazing material. It was all from people who were ad-libbing on their own, because there was nobody telling them what to shoot. And that was an awkward feeling, to administer material that you had no influence on whatsoever.
LENSE-MOLLER: It also came in little bitty pieces that weren’t marked or anything, so the editor had to do a huge archaeological job to find out how it fit together. He’d use Google Earth and say, “Okay, this is this street, and they’re walking in that direction, and the sun is shining, so it’s probably the same event as this footage that we got two months ago ….”
