A critically-acclaimed new documentary features the work of “a group of renegade video journalists who rely on handheld cameras, laptop computers and satellite Internet connections to transmit news from a closed nation.” Burma VJ: Reporting from a Closed Country, a new film which chronicles the work of the Democratic Voice of Burma, a grantee of the National Endowment for Democracy.
“The viral videos of the Democratic Voice of Burma are like the hidden printing presses of earlier underground revolutionary movements, except that the portability of the cameras and the ease of Web and satellite-based distribution make them harder to suppress,” writes AO Scott in the New York Times.
Former dissident and Czech president Vaclav Havel reportedly gave a copy of the film to US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton when she was recently in Prague.
The group’s work shines a light on people’s resistance and resilience that mainstream news media otherwise appear unable to highlight. ”Even before these mass demonstrations, we reached out to donors to make our own investments in the country,” says Khin Maung Win, executive director of the DVB. “There are a handful of foreign journalists in Burma, but they cannot get the footage out, because they have no infrastructure”:
Employing an intricate network of smugglers to bring their countrymen the news, the DVB regularly sneaks footage to Thailand and then on to Norway, where a TV signal is beamed back into Burma. It was thanks to these smuggled DVB reports that the world learned about both the 2007 uprising and the humanitarian crisis following last year’s devastating cyclone. “Two million people were homeless, and there was no rescue effort under way to find the 80,000 people who were missing,” Win says. “If we had not been there, would people have known anything about it?”
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