Now VJs come to the big screen….
Burma VJ, a feature documentary film by Danish director Anders Ostergaard, opens today at the Fim Forum in New York.
VJs are generally not the topic of feature film, or of any film for that matter, but they are certainly a growing presence around the world.
Burma may provide the perfect spot for VJ journalism – oppressive, barring conventional media (the BBC correspondent covers Burma from Thailand).
Ostergaard’s film is a compendium of VJ-driven reports, many of them shaky and shot from a distance, but compelling none the less. Anyone showing up with a large camera and crew would have been arrested on the spot.
What makes the film interesting, (besides promoting the VJ concept in the title, which I believe is a first), is that the filming and the narration are done by “Joshua”, a Burmese pro-democracy activist.
How seldom in our own world do those whose fate is on the line actually end up shooting or narrating their own stories. How much different Iraq might have turned out had we found a dozen Iraqi VJs and compiled their own reports on what was going on inside their country. Hey, we could do that now! But it would mean undercutting the ‘reporting’ done by network correspondent who (oops), don’t speak the local language, know the region, understand the culture or have any sense of the history or politics of the place.
Yes, this is what ‘informs’ us on a daily basis.
So maybe the shooting in Burma VJ is shaky. At least we know that the VJs know what they are talking about and from which perspective they come. This is the real ‘reality’ TV, and ironically, the stakes are a good deal higher than getting voted off the island.
Anyone caught reporting in this way would have been summarily jailed for many years – if they were so fortunate as to pass through Burma’s rather helter-skelter legal system. A shot in the back of the neck in the middle of the night might have been more predictable.
Sheila Nevins, head of non-fiction production at HBO (who has bought the film), commented that one can only imagine what would have happened had someone been able to smuggle a VJ camera into Auschwitz.
Based on the upshot and the current state of affairs in Burma today, probably nothing.
The military junta crushes the uprising and is still in control.
However, the film does underscore the terrible poverty of our own reporting from much of the world, and our almost colonialist attitudes toward ‘locals’ reporting on their own stories. In short, we just don’t feel that we can trust them. Better to send the white man to take a look.
Maybe Burma VJ will go nowhere, besides a few film festivals. But I don’t think so. Not based on the merits of the film, per se, but rather on the consequences of a new technology of cheap and easy to use video cameras and an Internet that carries video.
