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Sugar & Spice (2016)

Sugar & Spice

Making sweets – and conversation

Synopsis

A lovingly filmed portrait of the filmmaker’s parents who eke out a living making ‘jaggery’ sweets from toddy palm syrup in Myanmar’s central dry zone.

Director's Biography

Mi Mi Lwin (born in 1992) comes from Nyaung Oo Township in Mandalay Division in Myanmar’s central dry zone. Her parents are toddy palm farmers. After graduating from Yezin Agricultural University, she moved to Yangon where she took up an internship at the independent non-profit organisation Enlightened Myanmar Research (EMR). Since being accepted into Yangon Film School in 2014, she has worked on numerous films in various capacities, including on the soundtrack for The Bus Conductor, and has edited many a YFS film (The Music Lover, The Gatekeeper, The Father I Knew, Opium Farmer, Midtown Yangon, Shifting Sands) as well as films about YFS courses. For her second-year directing project Sugar & Spice, she chose to portray the lives of her own hard-working parents. The resulting film, of which she was also editor, has travelled to dozens of film festivals at home and abroad and won a string of awards including three at the Japanese ShortShorts Film Festival.

Awards & Nominations

June, 2017
Short Shorts Film Festival & Asia
Winner of Grand Prix
Tokyo, Japan
June, 2017
Short Shorts Film Festival & Asia
Winner of Asia International Best Short Award
Tokyo, Japan
June, 2017
Short Shorts Film Festival & Asia
Winner of Governor of Tokyo Award
Tokyo, Japan
March, 2017
Watersprite International Student Film Festival
Best Student Documentary Award
Cambridge, United Kingdom
September, 2016
Wathann Film Fest #6
Best Southeast Asian Film Award
Yangon , Myanmar
December, 2015
Winner of Goethe-Institute Documentary Award
Yangon, Myanmar
December, 2016
Singapore International Film Festival
Singapore Southeast Asian Competition
Singapore
November, 2016
IDFA International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam
Holland Student Documentary Competition
Amsterdam, Netherlands

Screenings

November, 2021
11th Five Flavours Asian Film Festival
Warsaw, Poland
November, 2021
Interfilm International Short Film Festival
Berlin, Germany
February, 2021
Rising Gardens Film Festival
New Delhi, India
June, 2020
2 Rivers Cross-Cultural Documentary Cinema
Koblenz, Germany
October, 2018
Seoul International Senior Film Festival
Seoul, South Korea
July, 2018
Lancang-Mekong Anthropology Documentary Forum
Yunnan, China
January, 2018
Dhaka International Film Festival
Dhaka, Bangladesh
October, 2017
BIFED – Bozcaada International Filmfestival of Ecological Film
Bozcaada, Turkey
February, 2017
4th Mae La Film Festival
Mae Sott, Thailand

Director's Filmography

2021

14‘31‘‘

2020

13‘59‘‘

2020

19‘37‘‘

2018

Sound Recordist

16‘46‘‘

2018

Co-Animator

5‘37‘‘

2016
Sugar & Spice

Director/Sound Recordist

16‘0‘‘

2016

Editor

14‘27‘‘

2016

7‘8‘‘

2015

Sound/Composer

17‘23‘‘

Pictures

Sugar and Spice
Sugar and Spice
Sugar and Spice
Sugar and Spice
Sugar and Spice