Donghwan Kim screenign response: Burma VJ

Burma VJ was a very stunning piece of documentary, that it was full of action and harsh images, and the flow of the documentary, as the filmmaker VJs the footages coming from Burma, is very refreshing.
The shaky visuals and the un-tamed audio of heavy breathing of the cameraman and street noise in this documentary throws away the common voyeuristic point of view in many other documentaries, and immediately reveals that the filmmaker and the cameraperson are actually ‘part of’ the situation. The opening was very suspenseful, as the footages of very normal day of a Burma street, where people buy and sell things, go to work like usual, are shown with the filmmaker’s voice that says ‘something was going on in the streets, within the people.’ The memory of brutal suppression by the government in 1988 people of Burma’s fight for democracy keeps recurring, adding the suspense. It is a constant battle between the hope of ‘this time it will be better’ and the fear of massacre that already happened once.
The fear is unfiltered through the lens, as we see the cameraman quickly hide the camera when he sees a policeman. However, the voice says, ‘the heart is beating too fast, but we keep on shooting.’ The Burmese monks’ march begins and the viewpoint is right in the middle of the crowd. The audience immediately walks and feels the atmosphere of the Burmese street as the cameraman bravely walks inside the march. This is a different kind of documentary, that Burma VJ is about something the filmmaker belongs to and fights for. It is such a different perspective that keeps the viewers from staying in the position of tourists to a foreign world. It urges emotional reaction to the viewers, and unlike most of the other documentaries which try to demand something to the viewer, such as Michael Moore’s documentaries or Chicago 10, the insider’s point of view becomes instantly very persuasive without many words.
The failure of the Burmese people’s fight for democracy is very heartbreaking. The brutal violence pictured in the footages is followed by the silence of the filmmaker in a shadow(when he waits for the cameraman to answer the phone). This was a very powerful moment of sadness and anger. The filmmaker throughout the film is hidden in a shade, and as well as the sense of danger the filmmaker is in, the figures in shadows shows that the film is not about making heroes, but about letting the people know of the outrageous situations in Burma.