Listen To Us

Synopsis

Save the Children's work in Myanmar includes involving children, community based groups, civil society and the government to establish child protection systems at all levels. Their Child Protection Programme is built on listening to children's views on the violence, abuse, exploitation and neglect they face in their lives, and working with them and others to find solutions to these problems.

Listen To Us brings us closer to the lives of three of the young participants of a child participation workshop in Thanlyin Township and follows them – and the other workshop participants – as they are given the chance not only to express their troubles but to do something about them with their own participation.

Director's Biography

Lay Thida was born in 1983 in Loikaw, Kayah state in eastern Myanmar. An English graduate of Taunggyi University, she joined the very first YFS  course in 2005. A regular sound recordist on YFS productions, her directorial debut Just A Boy earned her a Heinrich Boell Foundation Documentary Award in 2007. Her subsequent work includes portraits of an ex-poppy grower (A Farmer’s Tale, 2007), a young development worker (The Change Maker, 2008), and a hard-hitting documentary about domestic violence in Shan State (Unreported Story, 2011). In 2010, she received a Charles Wallace Trust Fellowship to attend a documentary course at the National Film and Television School in the United Kingdom, which culminated in the production of a short documentary, Wrong Side Up. A Fulbright scholar, she took an MA in Development in International Policy Studies in Middlebury Institute of International Studies, Monterey, California in 2013 before returning to Myanmar in 2015 where she continued to make films for a range of clients in the development sector. Alongside her work as a filmmaker, Lay Thida also co-founded and ran an NGO, Better Life.

Director's Filmography

2005
Peace Of Mind

Sound Recordist

10‘11‘‘

2006

Sound Recordist

15‘20‘‘

2006
A Sketch of Wathone

Sound Recordist

15‘58‘‘

2006
The Uninvited Guest

Sound Recordist

13‘49‘‘

2006

Director/Editor

13‘5‘‘

2007

Director/Editor

18‘18‘‘

2007
The Merry Widows of Nam Mun Village

Sound Recordist

22‘22‘‘

2008

Director/Editor

15‘59‘‘

2009
Listen To Us

Director/Editor

18‘45‘‘

2009
The Long Way Home

Director/Editor

8‘15‘‘

2009

23‘0‘‘

2011

12‘0‘‘

2011

Director/Editor

12‘22‘‘

2011

Director

18‘50‘‘

Pictures