Synopsis
The narrative of a woman whose ex-boyfriend made private pictures and information public, inviting virtual mob-violence and relentless harassment by unknown men. The film focuses on the idea of consent and the backlash that occurs when a woman acts with a sense of agency in her intimate life. As more and more of us live our lives online, it reflects an increasing experience among many young women.
ABOUT THE FILM COURSE
Yangon Film School has created powerful documentary animations based on testimonies from survivors of gender-based violence (GBV) in Myanmar. The docuanimations were created with the support from the Gender Equality Network, the Heinrich Boell Foundation and SIDA.
Nine students from across the country aged between 22 and 38 years were trained in docuanimation by Lisa Crafts (USA), an award-winning filmmaker, animator and educator specialising in docuanimation and Paromita Vohra, an award-winning filmmaker, writer and gender activist from India.
Filmmaker's Biographies
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Thae Zar Chi Khaing
Thae Zar Chi Khaing (born in 1991) comes from Sittwe in Myanmar’s Rakhine State. After graduating with a degree in geology, she began working as a video journalist. She attended Yangon Film School from 2016 to 2018 during which time she worked on a large number of projects as either cinematographer and/or editor (e.g. Eim Chan Thar’s Tofu Nights, Shin Thandar’s Worlds Apart and Cherry Thein’s Mother’s Burden. Having attended a YFS course in ‘participatory video’, Thae Zar Chi Khaing joined a YFS Travelling Cinema crew to Inle Lake in 2017 to help a local community create two short films about environmental pollution. She was also co-animator on one of the trio of films in the series End Violence Against Women! produced during the School’s first animation course in 2017. The films reached an audience of almost 1m on social media and on national television. Seeds of Sadness, which she shot, directed and edited in her second year at YFS, was joint-winner of the 2017 Goethe Institut Ruby Documentary Award.
Saw Eh Doh Poe
Saw Eh Doh Poe is Karen and grew up in Yangon. Born in 1991 into a Christian pastor’s family, he attended a BARS liberal arts course at the Myanmar Insitute of Theology and then studied IT before turning his attentions to anime and graphic design. In 2014, in between stints as a graphic artist and fixer/producer at Eleven Media and BBC Media Action respectively, he enrolled at Yangon Film School where he attended the School’s flagship documentary course among others. He found his true calling in the School’s first docuanimation class in 2017 from which a trio of short films entitled End Violence Against Women! emerged. These films scored almost 1m views on social media and were also broadcast on national television and radio. His animation skills continued to grow in subsequent courses in 2018 during which he was a key creative on the award-winning sand animation Limbo (Grand Prix at WHO’s Health for All film festival in 2020), and the papier-mâché stop-motion film Our Town. He also worked on a series of animations on land rights and acceptance of difference produced by the School’s production arm Yangon Film Services.
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‘This course was designed to achieve two aims,’ says Yangon Film School founder Lindsey Merrison. ‘Firstly, we wanted to help the students understand the nuances of gender based violence – its root causes, its emotional impact on victims and the way in which the structural, cultural and psychological aspects of the phenomenon are interwoven. At the same time we sought to render these themes cinematically to a wider audience as effective and moving films, not simply didactic instructions. In this way, the course sought to provide students with new skills in documentary narrative approaches.’
