Synopsis
The heart-breaking story of a woman who was raped by a man in her neighbourhood and her struggle to overcome her feelings of despair and the insensitivity of social groups and administrative bodies towards her situation. The film focuses on the fact that the rapist is often known to the victim and that society tends to blame the victim instead of dealing with the perpetrator(s).
ABOUT THE FILM COURSE
Yangon Film School has created three 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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Eim Chan Thar
Eim Chan Thar (born in 1983) is of Karen ethnicity and comes from Myaungmya township in Ayeyarwady Region. Despite her parents’ misgivings, she spent four years working in a bank to save enough money to dedicate herself to film. In 2016 she joined Yangon Film School and directed her first documentary, Tofu Nights. Other YFS courses followed, giving rise to Don’t Blame Me!, a powerful animated documentary about a survivor of sexual violence that quickly went viral following its release on social media, and a collaborative fictional work, Easy Money. She attended the Myanmar Motion Picture Organization’s film directing course in 2018, creating Lon. A year later she studied cinematography at the National University of Arts and Culture and wrote a script, ‘My Precious Breakfast’. Eim Chan Thar is also a photographer and a painter. Her exhibited works include ‘The Novice’, and the paintings ‘Mother’ and ‘Hibiscus’. Bone Whisperers is her second documentary.
Cherry Thein
Born in Yangon in 1985, Cherry Thein studied English, psychology, communications and journalism. She has since contributed numerous articles on vulnerable children to different newspapers and magazines. Having attended a number of Yangon Film School courses including Documentary Directing and Development, Screenwriting, Film History and The Animated Documentary, she began developing a feature-length documentary with fellow YFS student Thae Zar Chi Khaing about young girls living on the streets of Mandalay. Mother’s Burden was her directorial debut.
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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.’
