Scandinavian documentaries on human rights film festival in Yangon

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. That is the premise of the third Human Rights Human Dignity International Film Festival, a weeklong event that opened yesterday and is screening at the Nay Pyi Taw and Waziyar Cinemas in Yangon.

Among the 65 short and feature-length documentaries, three films from Denmark and one film from Norway are represented.

The three Danish documentaries are ‘Something Better To Come’, a Danish-Polish film from 2014 made by Hanne Polak, who filmed the life of a local community of homeless people for 14 years. The central character of this unique time-lapse film is Yula, who has lived in one of the largest garbage dumps in Europe with her mother since she was a child.

‘The Look of Silence’ 2014 is directed by Joshua Oppenheimer. An award winning documentary about an Indonesian optometrist, still tortured by the loss of his brother to torture, who silently but steadily gets perpetrators of violence to confess their sins.

The third Danish documentary: We Are Journalists, produced by Ahmad Jalali Farahani, is not just an ordinary documentary film. It is a painful effort to understand how modern and educated Iranian people try to fight for democracy and freedom of speech. It’s also a film about how much they feel alone for achieving their goals.

No Word For Worry is a Norwegian documentary produced by Runar Jarle Wiik. The central character Hook grew up with the ocean as his universe; he is a sea nomad from a vanishing world. With stunning photography, this award-winning documentary follows Hook from the bottom of the modern social ladder on a epic voyage into the heart of Moken territory off the coast of Myanmar. More than a quest to salvage the remains of his culture, he faces the universal questions of identity, love, loss and belonging.

 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *