Burma VJ – Reporting from a Closed Country

The Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB) consists of about 30 Burmese reporters who secretly film the abuses in their country. The footage is then smuggled across the border and broadcast via satellite from the DVB's headquarters in Oslo. These are the images that could be seen across the globe when a revolution was about to erupt in the late summer of 2007. Led by Buddhist monks, more than 100,000 people took to the streets to march peacefully against the military dictatorship that had held the country in an iron grip for over 40 years. Burma VJ – Reporting from a Closed Country, winner of the Joris Ivens Award in 2008, is almost exclusively compiled from DVB footage. One of the reporters stays in touch with his colleagues from a hiding place in Thailand; his voice-over accompanies the shaky hand-held images of emergency deliberations by protesters, of the dispersion of the crowd, and of monks and civilians getting knocked down. Their cameras hidden in bags or clenched under their armpits, the DVB reporters risk their lives to take us right into the heat of the turmoil.