Episode #88: From Burma With Love
Kenneth Wong, a Burmese language instructor at UC Berkeley, has spent a lifetime studying the history of Burmese films, and the depiction of Burmese characters and plots in Hollywood. From analyzing the Burmese accents of stars ranging from Sylvester Stallone to Michelle Yeoh, to tracing how Burmese cinema has been impacted by the politics of the day, Kenneth has helped to make Burmese pop culture more accessible and contextualized in the West. He is also one of the organizers of the Burma Spring Benefit Film Festival, and in addition to describing the past several decades of the film industry in Myanmar, he shares some of his favorite picks from the upcoming event.
“It makes me feel very nostalgic [to talk about these films],” Kenneth says, explaining that he grew up in Yangon from the 1960’s through the early 1980s. He continues, “I remember watching these formulaic kind of romantic comedies that the Burmese movie industry just turned out like hotcakes every year by the dozens.” He notes these types of films rarely touched on relevant social issues, but were total escapism, with protagonists enjoying a middle-class lifestyle that few actual Burmese viewers could ever hope to achieve. “You couldn't really talk about poverty, because if you portrayed poverty on film, you somehow have to address the root causes of poverty,” he says.
Those locally made, sappy comedies competed not only with the latest Bollywood movies for screen time at the big Yangon movie houses, but a host of American blockbusters as well, James Bond being the most popular. Kenneth remembers observing the massively long lines for those imported films as a child, which indicated to him that Burmese movie-goers were not at all fooled by the lesser quality of their own country’s productions. Yet in retrospect, he believes that was not so much an indictment of the talents and abilities of those making the movies, but the political constants they were operating under.
“I have a feeling that there were a lot of people who, if they had been given the chance to make films, they could have made really great films that were on par with foreign films, but they just weren't able to,” he remarks sadly. “They just weren't given the kind of opportunity. So you ended up with only the handful of commercial film producers who keep producing the formulaic films that are the safest to produce.”
For an avid move watcher like Kenneth, everything changed with the democratic transition of the last decade. No longer would every film have to pass the scrutiny of the all-powerful Censor Board, whose decisions neither tolerated dissent nor allowed recourse for the artist. “Even though it wasn’t a fully democratic environment,” he notes, “it's a partial democracy, in which art was allowed room to breathe! And artists were allowed room to express themselves with less restraint, with less worry about censorship, or for being punished for saying the wrong thing.”
So during that period, it was like a finger removed from the dike. An artistic explosion flowed out, as people could now themselves freely without fear of punishment. “During that partial opening, everything just come tumbling out of their mouths as if like the dam just broke and everything came pouring out!” he recalls.
One such movie from those years that deeply impacted Kenneth was Golden Kingdom, a feature-length film which tells the story of four young Buddhist novices in Shan State. They are left alone in their monastery after the Sayadaw is called away on urgent business, and must fend for themselves as conflict breaks out. “These sorts of films, even if you don't know anything about the country, even if you don't know anything about the root causes of the civil war that is happening in the background, you can still appreciate that as simply coming-of-age film of a group of young monks who are coming to terms with adult issues that they were not necessarily prepared to face,” he notes.
While independent films started to take off in the more open artistic climate, Kenneth was especially impressed by the growth of locally made documentaries, citing My Buddha Is Punk as one example. While this film accurately depicts urban culture, others take on issues of social justice, ethnic minority rights, and LGBTQ issues. “Those are the sort of things that previously you couldn't even talk about openly in teashops,” he notes.
Since the upcoming film festival event includes dozens of films made during the pre-coup period, it provides a unique access to viewers around the world to films that otherwise they might never see. Additionally, there are some films about the recent coup itself. “[Some were] made in the early days of the anti-coup movement, before the army started cracking down with sniper shots, targeting protesters, for example, or just indiscriminately firing into the crowd. There was a lot of good footage, a lot of artistically made films that document the moment.”
And what about the stars who contributed their talents to that period of artistic blooming? While a handful have openly sided with the military, and others have only attended a few rallies in order to take selfies that promote their brand, others have made incredible sacrifices. Examples of the latter include Hta Hta Thet, a former beauty queen who has since joined a People’s Defense Force team, or Paing Takhon, a movie star and model who was recently sentenced to three years for his activism. Kenneth recognizes that celebrities hold a special kind of power in any society; some use it for the good, some for strictly selfish reasons, and some to cozy up to those in power.
“Many of the films that are in the lineup [of the film festival] are for a good reason. They were made in the last 10 years when there was this partial opening that allowed filmmakers to go into the country and make these films, or which allowed Burmese filmmakers to turn the lens turn the lens on their own and shoot what was happening around them and in their life, capture them, document them. So I think these films are much more diverse.”
To learn more about Kenneth Wong’s very interesting work, you can visit his blog.