Last month at the British Council in Yangon, Robert H. Lieberman showed his 88-minute documentary to a packed auditorium of over 100 viewers. The film is called They Call It Myanmar, and the premiere was a public screening with artists, film-makers, NGO workers and ordinary citizens attending to watch their own country from the viewfinder of a foreign film-maker. Lieberman had invited Aung San Suu Kyi, who also appeared in the film as one of the interviewees, but she couldn't make it.
"I didn't want to make a political film," says Lieberman, a physics lecturer from Cornell University and also a film-maker and novelist. "I want to put a human face on the country. I aim to show what the country is like through its own people. It is a portrait of Myanmar."
Lieberman talked to us when he stopped in Bangkok on his way back to Ithaca, New York, where he lives. They Call It Myanmar was recently screened at Landmark Sunshine Cinema in Manhattan, and Lieberman, who made the film with producer Deborah C. Hoard and editor David Cossack, is planning to show it in other major cities across the US. During his stop in Bangkok last year, the director showed the rough cut of the film informally to his class at Bangkok University, but at the moment there are no plans to screen the documentary anywhere else in Thailand.
Arriving in Yangon in late 2008 to work with the State Department, Liberman's original assignment was to train young locals in media production. But he realised the personal opportunity he had and began filming, entirely without permission, the landscape, the culture, and the inhabitants of that isolated land, with a mix of ethnographic curiosity and historical perspective. "The minute you tell a film-maker not to film something, it's like waving a red flag before a bull," says Lieberman, who also made a documentary, Last Stop Kew Gardens, in 2006 and a feature film, Green Lights, four years earlier.
"I went around talking to a lot of people; I really can't remember how many. I went everywhere except the Delta region. We cannot show the faces of some of the people we talked to if what they said was very political. My original plan was to make a character-driven movie, and I wanted to choose my subjects and follow their lives for a period. But I knew that the people I chose would get into trouble.
"To film in Myanmar you need permission. I didn't have any. The problem is that people are fearful when they talk, though my feeling is that it's becoming less so. In Myanmar, you don't know if you'll get into trouble because of something you do. When you cross the line, sometimes something happens, sometimes not. It's this unpredictability, intentionally or not, that works. You never know if they will come after you or not."
They Call It Myanmar is not a revelation, though it has a sizeable journalistic value for recording the reality of a place that has hardly been seen in the media. Lieberman filmed over 120 hours of footage over the period of three years _ last month he was in Yangon to document the Freedom Film Festival co-organised by Aung San Suu Kyi, to be edited into the new version of the movie _ and he also uses images from archives to narrate political developments and from other news agencies, chiefly the Democratic Voice of Burma, the exiled group of videographers whose own story was told in the Oscar-nominated Burma VJ. A travelogue and a sketch of a land, They Call It Myanmar is also an antidote to the dramatisation of The Lady, a French-produced biopic of Suu Kyi that was released in Bangkok earlier this month to a lukewarm reception.
Myanmar has returned to the spotlight after the release of Suu Kyi and the junta's appearance of opening up the country. The military regime's seeming readiness to cooperate with Asean is also a sign of change the world has been watching with attention. In They Call It Myanmar, the main attraction is Lieberman's interview with Suu Kyi; done in January 2011, it must be one of the first interviews with the Myanmar freedom fighter after her release. Conducted in a house and with a basic set-up and equipment, the talk showed Suu Kyi as determined, articulate, and perhaps a little tired.
She told Lieberman from the outset that personal questions should be avoided. Yet Suu Kyi talked about her father, General Aung San, while Lieberman tried to complete the picture by talking to someone close to the family about Suu Kyi's separation from her husband and two children.
Yet except the appearance of Suu Kyi, the film is largely concerned about the daily life of the people. It listens to the voice from the different corners, and Lieberman himself supplies constant narration that sometimes seems too explanatory. Where he succeeds is in making the place seem alive, and to pave the path for in-depth exposition of the country that is likely to become a subject of more movies in the near future.
"The West tends to be think in terms of binary. It's zero and one," says Lieberman. "But it's not black and white. It's very grey, and very complex. I don't see Myanmar turning into a democracy immediately, with problems solved and poverty alleviated. It's a long-term thing. The rebuilding of the country will take many years."
Aung San Suu Kyi in a photograph with Robert H. Lieberman, the director of They Call It Myanmar who interviewed her.
