Burma VJ Movie Review

The monks go on chanting: "Free from fear, free from distress, free from poverty, may they [the soldiers, their leaders] have peace in their hearts." It is a documentary with interest and impact well exceeding any Hollywood concoction.

The global explosion of electronic devices have turned a bright - if difficult-to-attain - spotlight on misdeeds that lurked in the dark since the world began.

During the protests against Iran's questionable election results last month, private cell phone footage, taken at great personal risk, provided most of the information about the repression of dissent.

Imagine a situation even more difficult - virtually impossible - to cover with the usual methods of journalism, a place where everything is restricted and forbidden. Think of North Korea, and the recent 12-year sentence of hard labor for the two young journalists from San Francisco whose crime was just to enter the country.

There is another country in Asia that's as closed and oppressed as North Korea: it's Burma, called Myanmar by the military dictators holding its people in an iron grip since 1962. The film "Burma VJ" chronicles the heroic work of local unpaid video journalists who recorded the Buddhist monks' uprising in 2007, the so-called Saffron Revolution. Demonstrators and cameramen alike risked imprisonment, torture, and death.

Participants in the protests had no illusions. Everybody in Burma knew about the previous attempt to gain freedom: in 1988, when Aung San Suu Kyi led the demonstrators, 3,000 of them were killed, thousands injured and imprisoned. Still, two years later, Aung San Suu Kyi - who was to receive the Nobel Prize in 1991 - won the election decisively, only to see the military annul the results and put her under house arrest.

And now, two decades later, thousands of Burmese - including monks - took to the streets again, and with foreign news crews banned, the Internet shut down, the Democratic Voice of Burma covered this historic event. A collective of 30 anonymous and underground video journalists recorded events on handycams and smuggled the footage out of the country, for worldwide distribution via satellite. "Burma VJ" shows what they did and how they did it, risking torture and death.

The 2008 cyclone, which estimated to have killed more than 100,000 Burmese, and still failed to move the military government to let in aid, overtook the events of 2007, but "Burma VJ" will keep the monks' heroic uprising in the minds and hearts of the world.