Synopsis
The story of a successful businesswoman who is beaten by her husband, and the psychological impact of the power and control wielded by him. Set in an upper-middle-class household, the film also dispels the stereotype that domestic violence only happens among the poor and/or ‘uneducated’.
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 1 | 3
May Htoo Cho
May Htoo Choo was born in 1982 and studied at the National University of Arts and Culture, majoring in music. After working for the National Symphony Orchestra as a violinist and as a music teacher at DoReMi Nursery school, she enrolled at YFS in 2007 and was cinematographer on the documentary A Piece of Eden. Choices marked her debut as a director. In 2017, she was co-creator of an animated documentary about domestic violence that scored almost a million views on social media. May Htoo Cho continues to work regularly as a director or editor on various films commissioned by the School’s development partners including Myanmar Midwife – One Year Later, Fields of Dreams and Now I Can Read as well student works such as the short drama Book Lover; Cherry Thein’s moving portrait of abandoned wives Mother’s Burden, and Nyan Lynn Aung’s Living with Elephants.
Khine Minn Soe
Painter and illustrator Khine Minn Soe studied at the State School of Fine Arts. A Rakhine ethnic, he attended YFS courses in documentary, editing and screenwriting in 2016 and in 2017 joined the School’s first course in docuanimation, helping to create a film in the series End Violence Against Women! He was also a member of the five-person crew that filmed the 2019 ‘true fictions’ project The Banyan Tree.
Myat Minn Khant
Mandalay-born Myat Minn Khant was a graphic designer before he joined YFS in 2016. He provided the soundtrack for the short documentaries Vegetable Stall and Through Thick and Thin and was also part of the creative team behind a trio of animated documentaries aiming to raise awareness about violence against women. He was one of the five-person crew on the short fiction The Banyan Tree and is currently developing a feature-length fiction film with a grant from the Myanmar Script Fund.
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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.’
