Film Review: Neither Burma nor Myanmar

They Call it Myanmar: Lifting the Curtain was screened for the first time at the prestigious International Documentary Film Festivalin Amsterdam on November 19 to a packed cinema. It premiered in Vienna earlier this month, and was similarly well-received.

The film was conceived a few years ago when American author and filmmaker Robert H. Liebermanwas invited by the US state department to shoot a documentary about Burma and got involved in some art projects with locals in the process. Liberman says the target of his film is the people who know nothing about the country.

The most relevant of these people may be American voters concerned over Obama’s foreign policy shift towards what Hillary Clinton now refers to simply as ‘this country,’ neither Burma nor Myanmar. After all, a very challenging election awaits Obama next year. His popularity rating needs to be maintained if he is serious about getting re-elected.

The US détentewith Burma has been in the making over the last decade. Clinton’s December visit was not a knee-jerk reaction to recent reforms in Burma. Rather it is the first in a series of carefully calculated rewards to Naypyidaw for living up to some of Washington’s expectations, most importantly President Thein Sein’s accommodationist policy of the West, the government’s deepening role in ASEAN—and consequently lessened affiliation with China—and its dialogue with dissident leader Aung San Suu Kyi. We now know that some more benchmarks were set during Clinton’s visit.

As Lieberman stresses that Burma has been the most isolated and quaint country in the world in the opening scene of the film, another state-sponsored American documentary about Burma that came out after John Foster Dulles’ visit of the country in 1955 sprang to mind.

The opening lines of the old film are remarkable, “Today there are many new small nations around the world of which we know very little…in 1949 our foreign aid experts were inclined to write Burma off. A small nation, about nine-tenths of it already in the hands of the communists, with only a very small army, it was led politically by what was regarded as a religious fanatic, a little man who spent most of his time meditating.” Little did the US policy makers know which direction newly independent Burma was taking.

Continue reading this article at Sampsonia Way magazine

This article was written for Sampsonia Way by Ko Ko Thett, a poet, literary translator and political commentator from Burma. With James Byrne, he is the co-editor of Bones Will Crow, Fifteen Contemporary Burmese Poets. He lives in Vienna.