The Myanmar Film Collective

The winner of this year’s Berlinale Documentary Award, and recipient of the first ever Tony Elliott Impact Award, the remarkable Myanmar Diaries is the work of an anonymous and, by necessity, secretive group of young Burmese filmmakers known as the Myanmar Film Collective. They share the story behind it. ‘Myanmar Diaries got underway in the first week of the country’s coup. It was February 2021 and ten of us – friends and friends of friends – decided to document life in this extreme situation. We initially considered publishing poetry or photographs, but a film was quicker and more far-reaching. We were inspired by (Oscar-nominated documentary) Burma VJ, which had recorded its country’s 2007 protests, but we didn’t want to do a strictly citizen journalism-style documentary. All of us had different backgrounds and different styles. So we thought: let’s do an omnibus of ten diverse, interwoven films instead. The first scene is a viral video of an aerobics instructor dancing as the military moves in behind her. For us, it summed up the absurdity of the coup: it’s just a meaningless exercise in ego from the military. Unfortunately, we are seeing that again with Putin, although that’s a different story. In 2021, the military’s power structure wasn’t even being challenged – they’d become millionaires and their children are now very successful business people, so there was no need for a coup. We weren’t expecting it, yet there it was, happening right in front of our eyes. Photograp