Burma VJ

Burma VJ, subtitled Reporting From a Closed Country, was one of the nominees for the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature at last year's Oscars. It lost to The Cove, and I think it's instructive to look at the differences in the two films and why I think The Cove is a much better film.

So often I think documentaries are judged by their subject matter. Surely the oppressive military junta in Burma, which has killed and imprisoned thousands of citizens over the last twenty years, is a worthwhile subject. But Burma VJ has built-in problems that hindered my engagement. It is told almost entirely through the surreptitious video work of reporters that work for the banned news source, the Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB). These images were then smuggled out of the country and broadcast around the world, including back into Burma through satellite and on the Internet.

This is an incredibly gutsy thing for these people to be doing, as capture would mean arrest, imprisonment, and torture. But personal courage alone isn't enough to draw the viewer in, at least not this one. The problem is that there is no story here. Documentaries do two things--they impart information, but they should also tell a story. What we have here is roughly ninety minutes of handheld video of street demonstrations, mainly those conducted by Buddhist monks. Some of it is pretty powerful stuff, but it is all objective, and the viewer, unless already familiar with the situation, doesn't have a surrogate in the story.

The director, Anders Østergaard, does take a stab at this, as the film is narrated by "Joshua," the coordinator of the DVB. He is always in shadow, as his identity needs to be protected, and there are scenes reconstructed with him on the phone with his reporters. He is a sympathetic figure, and the danger is certainly palpable, but it just didn't grab me the way a film like The Cove did. Comparing the slaughter of dolphins to the torture of innocent civilians is a useless exercise, but The Cove had a narrative arc that made it seem like a thriller. Burma VJ is like a long news story, and frankly, I found it all a little dull.