‘Miners Shot Down’ wins award at Human Rights Dignity Film Festival in Burma

RANGOON: A 30-minute documentary about land confiscation in Burma won two out of eight awards at the Human Rights Human Dignity International Film Festival (HRHDIFF) this week in Rangoon.

The Burmese documentary, This Land Is Our Land by Sai Kong Kham, won the Aung San Suu Kyi National Film Award and the Vaclav Havel Library Award at the HRHDIFF award ceremony on Thursday.

The second annual HRHDIFF honoured film-makers with eight awards for national, South-east Asian and international documentary films, with the various prizes’ namesakes paying tribute to prominent figures in human rights and pro-democracy movements globally.

Miners Shot Down by South African director Rehad Desai looks at deadly antimining protests in August 2012, and won the Aung San Suu Kyi Award in the International Film category.

The Last Refuge, which tells the story of Cambodia’s Bunong people, won the Aung San Suu Kyi Award for Asian films.

Other winners included An Untold Story by Joses Dennis, which took home the Min Ko Naing Award; the March 13 award went to The Seller, an animation by Zaw Bo Bo Hein; the Hanthawaddy U Win Tin Award was given to Enter, a 15-minute film about the life of a political prisoner by Kaung Sint; and the Peter Wintonick Award was bestowed on Article 18, produced by a trio of students of the Yangon Film Institute.

The last award honours the late Canadian film-maker Peter Wintonick, and was given to the best film in the festival’s student competition. Article 18 tells the story of political activists who have faced charges and been imprisoned under Article 18 of Burma’s Peaceful Assembly Law over the last two years.

The law has frequently come in for criticism in the human rights community and is tabled for discussion in Burma’s parliament.

In a closing speech, director Min Htin Ko Ko Gyi said public interest and support for the films was “encouragement to keep organising this… festival.” Organisers said the films attracted even more interest than the inaugural event last year, which drew some 20 000 people.

Opening with the Cambodian documentary The Missing Picture, the festival

Rehad Desai’s look at 2012’s deadly mining protests won Aung Suu Kyi Award

screened 66 out of 67 documentary films at Rangoon’s Waziyar and Junction Square Cineplex.

It featured 32 Burmese films, nine South-east Asian films and 26 international films, which were judged by a panel of 19 national and international jurists.

The festival did not play out without controversy, however. One of the five short films shot by Burmese film students, The Open Sky, was not screened due to threats aired via social media. The film depicts the friendship between two women, one a Buddhist and the other a Muslim, in central Burma’s Meikhtila, which was wracked by interreligious violence that killed more than 40 people in March 2013.

Min Htin Ko Ko Gyi said the festival’s organising board and juries cancelled the screening because it appeared to have stoked lingering Buddhist-Muslim tensions, and that organisers were “not holding the film festival to create conflict”. Min Htin Ko Ko Gyi insisted that the screening was merely being postponed. “The film, when it shows later, will not be a censored version,” he said.

In the award ceremony’s opening remarks, US ambassador to Burma Derek Mitchell noted the controversy surrounding The Open Sky.

“Everybody who values the meaning of this event must oppose the use of threats or intimidation to suppress speech,” Mitchell said. – The Irrawaddy