Burma VJ

The cliché that something hasn’t really happened unless it’s on YouTube is lent a special kind of profundity by this inspiring, and occasionally horrifying, documentary.

In September 2007, as protesting monks in Burma marched barefoot into the guns of an oppressive regime, the world was forced to sit up and take notice by the equally extraordinary bravery of a small band of reporters. With foreigners unable to gain access to the country, journalists from the Democratic Voice of Burma took to the streets armed with video cameras, risking their lives to record history in the making before smuggling the footage out of the country and onto the internet.

As the Burmese junta crack down on the demonstrators, Anders Østergaard’s film takes on the terrifying immediacy of a home-made horror, as young adults cower in a stairway praying for strength in the face of death; while a Japanese photo-journalist is brutally murdered. The DVB were there to record it, and to offer a vivid and tragic call to arms.

Matt Bochenski