Now they’ve bought the property while the protagonist’s family falls on financial hard times. The Muslims once slept outside on an unwanted bedstead, donated by the protagonist’s father. In the film, the protagonist Tha Gyar (played by actor Tun Tun) is released from jail only to be greeted by a Muslim family at what used to be his house.
The 2017 film, Oak Kyar Myat Pauk (Grass Grows Between the Bricks), won three Myanmar Academy Awards for the Best Film, Best Actor and Best Film Director.
#MYANMAR MOVIES FREE#
‘Many people seem to think it’s fine to discriminate’īut even so-called quality movies aren’t free of deep-seated prejudice.
#MYANMAR MOVIES MOVIE#
In Myanmar, we have not had a quality movie for a decade.” “Both the producers and audiences are at fault. “If the audiences are sophisticated, the movies will be sophisticated,” he tells TIME.įIlm critic Kyaw Thet Swe says it’s also the fault of a complacent industry. Kyi Soe Tun, who, as a winner of five Myanmar Academy Awards, counts as one of the country’s handful of serious filmmakers, says the low level of education is to blame.
In 2017, there were 53 local films, almost double compared to 2016’s total, shown on theatrical release in Myanmar. Using that formula, the industry is growing. It’s the safest way to get pass the censors and avoid offending the all-powerful military. Instead, moviegoers are fed lowbrow fare by a tawdry film industry, with movies revolving around stock plots and themes and functioning as little more than vehicles for a handful of well-known actors. But it has still not been shown in its home country because its realistic portrayal of monastic life is at odds with the romanticized view of Buddhist clergy preferred by the authorities of this predominantly Buddhist nation. The Monk (2014), by independent filmmaker The Maw Naing, is one of the few films of quality to have been made in recent years and has been warmly acclaimed on the international festival circuit. Instead, the ruling National League for Democracy (NLD) left much censorship apparatus in place. Since then, many of Myanmar’s 135-plus ethnic groups have chafed under military rule, with some even taking up arms.Īlthough the junta was replaced by a military-backed civilian government in 2011, the expected renaissance of local cinema has not materialized. The architect of independence, Aung San, belonged to the majority Bama people, and had agreed to a federal system of government with the leaders of other ethnic minorities-but he was assassinated before the agreement was implemented.
Minorities are seen as easy targets in a Southeast Asian nation that has been bedeviled by racial tensions ever since its independence from the British in 1948. “There is a psychological injury being done to ethnic minorities,” Khun Lwici tells TIME.
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