Mark Nickolas

New Directions in Documentary

Prof. Deirdre Boyle

March 21, 2012

Midterm Exam: Burma VJ

“This film is comprised largely of material shot by undercover reporters in Burma. Some

elements of the film have been reconstructed in close co-operation with the actual persons

involved, just as some names, places, and other recognizable facts have been altered for security

reasons and in order to protect individuals.” (opening titles in Burma VJ.)

The 2010 Academy Award-nominated Burma VJ (2008) shined a bright spotlight on one of

the world’s most repressive authoritarian regimes in the world with its powerful depiction of the

anti-government protests of 2007 – led by Buddhist monks – and the brutal crackdown days later.

Burma (officially, the Republic of the Union of Myanmar), which had been occupied by

Japan during World War II, achieved independence from Great Britain in 1948, after more than 60

years of colonial rule. After struggling with several communist insurgencies in its post-independence

period as a democratic republic, it fell into the hands of the military following a 1962 coup when the

army overthrew the elected government rocked by economic crisis and ethnic conflict. What had

been one of Southeast Asia’s wealthiest countries quickly became one of its most impoverished.1

Burma’s current regime took power following another coup in 1988 when the army opened

fire on peaceful, student-led, pro-democracy protesters, killing an estimated 3,000 people. In the

intervening years, Burma regularly occupied the rungs of the most repressive and closed-societies in

the world – alongside North Korea, Cambodia, Laos, and China.2

In the years following the 1988 uprisings, a handful of Burmese expatriates living in Oslo,

Norway (mainly former journalists and political activists) launched a non-profit media organization

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called the Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB) to make broadcasts aimed at providing uncensored

news about the country, its authoritarian rulers, and the political climate.3

At the time, the country’s political opposition was led by Aung San Suu Kyi, a former

United Nations staffer who had returned home in 1988 to take care of her ailing mother, but soon

found herself leading mass demonstrations for democracy in August 1988 (at one point addressing

half a million people at a mass rally in Rangoon). In 1990, Suu Kyi’s National League for

Democracy party won 59 percent of the national vote and 81 percent of the seats in Parliament.

Quickly, the results were nullified by the military rulers and Suu Kyi was placed under house arrest,

resulting in international condemnation. In 1991, she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.4

Democratic Voice of Burma Launched

It was in this context that the Democratic Voice of Burma launched its efforts. DVB was

initially founded as a radio station operated by a handful of staff and made its first broadcast into

Burma by shortwave radio in July 1992. According to the media watchdog Reporters Without

Borders, 63 percent of Burmese listen to DVB radio, which airs daily for two hours.5

In 2005, DVB received seed money to expand its work into television programming.

According to its own website:6

DVB opened its television studios for the first time in 2005, setting out on a path that

has revolutionized the way journalists operate in strictly controlled environments.

More than any of our other media platforms, DVB television is dependent on our

inside team, an 80-strong network of undercover video journalists, or VJs, that are

spread throughout Burma’s major urban areas and into the remote border regions.

Seventeen of these men and women, some as young as 21, are in prison, serving

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sentences from eight to 60-plus years. Many fall foul of the government’s notorious

Video and Electronics Acts, violation of which can result in double-digit jail terms.

Footage collected by the VJs is sent via post, through proxy internet servers and

sometimes on foot across the border to Thailand. This is then processed in our

Thailand and Norway offices into news and feature packages and broadcast back

into Burma via satellites in Europe, where it is watched by nearly 30% of the

population.

“A Little 30 Minute Festival Thing”

It was following DVB’s expansion into television in 2005 that they were approached by

Norwegian filmmakers/producers Lise-Lense Moller and Jan Krogsgaard about a project.7 Soon,

Danish filmmaker Anders Ostergaard joined the team as its director and began work on what he

believed was nothing more than a modest film festival project:

We started off with quite a small project about Joshua’s daily life as a street reporter

and the difficulties of getting any interesting material at all because of the obvious

hazards and risks of bringing out a camera on the streets of Rangoon. We were going

to have quite modest footage from his side and then add his own world to it in his

own narration. It was going to be a little 30 minute festival thing. In the midst of this,

there was this incredible coincidence [of the Saffron Revolution happening]. At the

time that we met him, Joshua was a junior member of the group and not high profile

or experienced. Suddenly, he was thrown into events in the way the film recounts,

and he became a catalyst for bringing news in and out of Burma to the world media,

which was an incredible rite of passage for him.8

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As the project developed, dramatic fuel price increases led to a series of anti-government

protests which became known as the Saffron Revolution. The short-lived campaign of civil

resistance, led by Buddhist monks, were put down by way of a brutal crackdown by the government.

In an instance, Ostergaard’s little “festival thing” would morph into a major and important work on

the political developments of this secret country.

Virtually closed to all outside media, the VJs disseminated to news outlets across the world

the only documentation of the protests that shook the government, exposing Burma’s civil rights

abuses for all to see, as well as to be documented by Ostergaard. The film was narrated by a VJ

named Joshua – who remained unseen for safety purposes while hiding in Thailand (having been

forced to flee Burma during filming) – and the viewer watches the entire narrative unfold almost

entirely through the captured video footage and a number of dramatic reenactments. Nick Dawson

of Filmmaker magazine argues that Joshua’s narration and the reenactments “brings out the powerful

dramatic aspects of this true story in a way that rivals any fiction film.”9 But that was precisely one

of the film’s problems.

Controversy

Despite its 2010 Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary Feature, Burma VJ

generated controversy over its use of reenactments for several of the film’s most crucial scenes. The

most noteworthy criticism came from TIME magazine’s Andrew Marshall:

Burma VJ is pitched as a documentary, when it is actually a docudrama relying

heavily on dramatic re-enactments…Mixing documentary footage with dramatic

reconstructions is said to be a hallmark of Ostergaard's films. With Burma VJ, that

hallmark is a handicap, undermining the film's credibility and dishonoring the very

profession its subjects risk their lives to pursue…No scene is labeled as a

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reconstruction. Some are convincingly real, yet others are so simply betrayed as re-

enactments by their wooden dialogue that soon I began to anxiously question the

authenticity of every scene. I felt moved by a sequence showing protesters gathering

on a Rangoon backstreet in defiance of the junta. But when I learned that it had been

shot from scratch in the northern Thai city of Chiang Mai, I felt something else:

manipulated. […]

But it is still hard to simply recategorize Burma VJ as a well-made docudrama and

leave it at that — not as long as its makers insist that it is a documentary, or that it is

composed largely of the work of undercover reporters, when at least half of it seems

re-enacted. The cause of Burma's democrats is ill-served by hyperbole and the

reconstruction of events to fit a version of the truth.10

Ostergaard, who studied journalism in Denmark before becoming a documentary filmmaker,

commented in an interview11 how he views the separation between reporting and filmmaking:

I’m in documentary, which is related to journalism and there’s a lot of method that is

shared with journalism. Also, I’m very keen on research – understanding an issue

before I describing it – and I would less on intuitive or subjective understanding. But

on the other hand I’ve deliberately chosen not to work in journalism; I take liberties

in my films which you can not take in journalistic. […]

It’s a great science to recreate the past, to make the past come alive, to be there as

much as possible. This leads me to do a lot of reenactments, but I’m always happiest

when there is some authentic or original element to the reenactment, like a sound

bite which I can then build the texture around. Basically I want to tell stories which

have the full cinematic flow, the feeling of being there as a cinemagoer, just like any

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feature film. And in order to achieve that narrative flow, you need

reenactment…Some of them [telephone conversations] are original, others are

reenacted but on the highest level of factuality. I would call them “self-

constructions,” in the sense that it was the real protagonists who relived their

conversations some months after they took place.[…]

When you have this narrative ambition, you will of course get closer to the language

of fiction films. I’ve been working with this for quite some years now and a lot of my

colleagues are doing that as well. It’s not that we want to tell lies, it’s not that we

want to fictionalize the world. It doesn’t allow us to make up stories that never

happened. What we’re trying to do is take factual events and represent them as richly

and as directly as we can; that’s why we resort to reenact.

In another interview:

I was very keen to follow Joshua as a protagonist and his story not only because of

what he was going through but also because of his narrative skills, his ability to put

everything together through his narration. When the whole uprising started there was

no way we could just go to his safe house in Thailand and follow him because it

would have been too much of a hazard to his safety; so the decision was made then

to wait until the entire situation calmed down and then go later to redo the whole

thing with him.12

Ostergaard told the New York Times that the film could not be told without reenactments:

I’m absolutely convinced there was no way to tell this story without

reenactments…Not only visually but on the soundtrack. The cellphone conversations

obviously weren’t recorded at the time. In fact, the V.J.’s wouldn’t have

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conversations while they were shooting. This is a cinematic distillation. But the

content is authentic in the sense that we have the real guys telling each other what

they told each other at the time.13

Finally, Ostergaard’s co-writer, Jan Krogsgaard, reiterated their thinking:

Andrew Marshall of Time magazine criticised us for using re-enactments, but I think

the broader message of the film is more important…Eighty per cent of the material

was recorded by VJs inside Burma. The re-enactments were done with the best

intentions of honouring the dangerous work of the VJs. DVB gave us full support

during the editing of the film by providing us with footage that was needed, making

sure we didn’t compromise VJs, and helping out with translations and contacts.14

Ethical Issues Facing Documentary Filmmakers

In 2009, Patricia Aufderheide and her colleagues at American University’s Center for Social

Media published the report Honest Truths: Documentary Filmmakers on Ethical Challenges in Their

Work15 which examined, among other things, the ethical challenges facing documentary filmmakers

when it came to issues such as reenactments and staging. The report was a summary of 45 long-form

interviews in which filmmakers were asked to describe ethical challenges that surfaced in their recent

work.16

One of them, documentarian and NYU film professor Sam Pollard, said that “bending” the

truth in pursuit of story was legitimate:

When I’m working on a doc, I try not to lie…But that doesn’t mean that I don’t bend

the truth. If you’re a filmmaker you try to create a POV, you bend and shape the

story to your agenda…Especially on a historical documentary, I keep to the facts.

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But if you want to really explore it, you have to shape and bend. It depends on the

project.17

Though, on the issue of staging and reenactments, filmmakers were split on what is

permissible. Some argued that more trivial restaging actions (“such as walking through a door”)

were not problematic since those were “not what makes the story honest.” Others believed that “it

was important that audiences be made aware somehow that the footage is recreated” (which, despite

Marshall’s criticism of Burma VJ, the film opens with credits that explicitly acknowledge

reenactments, suggesting that Marshall’s beef is more about desiring a signal to the viewers before

each such scene).18

Filmmaker Stanley Nelson argued that “people have to know and feel it’s a recreation. You

have to be 99.9 percent sure that people will know.” Others admitted to staging events to “occur at a

time convenient to the filming” and that “as long as the activities they do are those they would

normally be doing, if your filming doesn’t distort their life... there is still a reality that is

represented.”19

But arguably more closely aligned with the choices Ostergaard made in Burma VJ was this

comment from an unnamed filmmaker:

I would not want to put words in people’s mouth, or edit them in a way that’s not

leading to the larger truth. But I feel like it’s important to get the big-picture truth of

the situation on camera. The larger truth is that this conversation is going to happen

in this city, at some point, and so it doesn’t matter that it doesn’t happen at this

moment.

The report’s conclusion pointed to the lack of clarity and standards in ethical practice –

unlike those guiding traditional journalism. It also emphasized the strong overriding desire among

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filmmakers for social justice and a “higher truth,” even at the expense of sometimes controversial

editorial choices, with one filmmaker citing Picasso’s famous assertion that “Art is a lie that makes

us realize truth.”20

This report reveals profound ethical conflicts informing the daily work of

documentarians. The ethical conflicts they face loom large precisely because

nonfiction filmmakers believe that they carry large responsibilities. They portray

themselves as storytellers who tell important truths in a world where the truths they

want to tell are often ignored or hidden. They believe that they come into a situation

where their subjects, whether people or animals, are relatively powerless and they—

as media makers—hold some power. They believe that their viewers are dependent

on their ethical choices. Many even see themselves as executors of a “higher truth,”

framed within a narrative.

Based on his interviews concerning the film, Ostergaard’s quest for “higher truth” appears to

be that which drove his editorial choices in Burma VJ, especially considering the lack of available

archival footage for some of the pivotal moments.

The argument of what is appropriate in documentary is a permanent part of the form’s

DNA. Purists who hold documentarians to a standard similar to journalism fail to appreciate that

even the most balanced and “objective” form of reporting is the product of countless editorial

choices and decisions – who gets interviewed, which quotes are used, which paragraphs are used

first or last, how the information is presented, and which “facts” are used as the story’s predicate in

the first instance.

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As I’ve written before, I believe Patricia Aufderheide best captures the essence of what

documentary filmmaking is all about:

“[D]ocumentaries are about real life; they are not real life. They are not even

windows onto to real life. They are portraits of real life, using real life as their raw

material, constructed by artists and technicians who make myriad decisions about

what story to tell to whom, and for what purpose.”21

Burma VJ again reminds us that while documentary’s form, style, and content may be

contentious, messy, and divisive, it remains one of the most powerful vehicles for shining light on

the darkest corners of our humanity, as this film so powerfully does.

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NOTES

1 Freedom in the World 2007: Burma. Freedom House. 2007. Web. 15 Mar. 2012<http://www.freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2007/burma>.

2 Ibid.

3 “About DVB.” Democratic Voice of Burma, n.d. Web. 15 Mar. 2011 <http://donate.dvb.no/>.

4 “Aung San Suu Kyi - Biography.” Nobelprize.org. 15 Mar 2012<http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1991/kyi-bio.html>.

5 “About DVB.”

6 Ibid.

7 Konrad, Todd. “Film Interview: Burma VJ.” Vegas Outsider. 2 Mar. 2010. Web. 28 Feb. 2012<http://www.vegas-outsider.com/articles/film/interviews/169-burma-vj-interview>.

8 Dawson, Nick. “Anders Ostergaard, Burma VJ.” Filmmaker. 22 Feb 2010. Web. 28 Feb. 2012<http://www.filmmakermagazine.com/news/2010/02/anders-stergaard-burma-vj-by-nick-dawson/>.

9 Ibid.

10 Marshall, Andrew. “Burma VJ: Truth as Casualty.” TIME. 29 Jan. 2009. Web. 28 Feb. 2012<http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1874773,00.html>.

11 Dawson.

12 Konrad.

13 Anderson, John. “Monks, Tanks and Videotape.” The New York Times. 17 May 2009. Web. 28 Feb. 2012<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/17/movies/17ande.html>.

14 Jensen, Stefan V. “A peek behind the bamboo blinds.” Southeast Asia Globe. 6 Jan. 2010. Web. 28 Feb. 2012<http://www.sea-globe.com/Regional-Affairs/a-peek-behind-the-bamboo-blinds.html>.

15 Aufderheide, Patricia, et al. Honest Truths: Documentary Filmmakers on Ethical Challenges in Their Work. Centerfor Social Media, American University School of Communications. Sep 2009. Web. 28 Feb. 2012<http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/making-your-media-matter/documents/best-practices/honest-truths-documentary-filmmakers-ethical-chall>.

16 Ibid, p. 1.

17 Ibid, p. 17.

18 Ibid.

19 Ibid, p. 18.

20 Ibid, p. 17.

21 Aufderheide, Patricia. Documentary Film: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2007, p. 2.