NEW DOCUMENTARY BLOWS LID OFF BURMA
Why the silence about what’s going on in Burma? Why is the trouble in this paradise not cause for outcry? We’ve heard of Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi and her heroic but unsuccessful efforts to achieve freedom and justice in her country. Beyond that, Burma (renamed Myanmar by the current military dictatorship) has slipped almost completely from the US media and our collective attention.
"Kalama Sutta: Seeing is Believing" is an extraordinary new film that will remedy this gap in our personal and public consciousness. Produced and directed by award-winning filmmaker Holly Fisher, this 90 minute documentary is both highly informative and deeply inspiring. Smuggled footage, archives, and web imagery counterpoint sights and sounds gathered by the filmmaker to expose the the human rights abuse, environmental degradation, and ethnic genocide inflicted by Burma's brutal military regime. Searing narratives of exiled leaders struggling for democracy and indigenous rights are laced into this poetic essay about the truth of appearances. The result is a powerful drama that is also a dazzling collage, a surprising tapestry, and an unforgettable artistic experience.
Here is an unprecedented view of a country in purgatory, its citizens enslaved. What the military junta presents to tourists and the outside world is light years from the reality of current conditions. To get beneath appearances and understand the real political, cultural, and artistic truth of this country, you must see this film; as it unfolds, the story of the Golden Land that is Burma becomes a conduit to discover shared vulnerabilities in a globalized world.
By Edith Mirante, author of "Burmese Looking Glass"
"With Kalama Sutta filmmaker Holly Fisher conducts an exploration into the very soul of a resistance movement. This is a deeply moving, engaging, multi-layered portrait of Burma in chains and of those who defy their country's enslavement."
By Holly Willis, LA Weekly, September 27, 2002
New York-based experimental filmmaker Holly Fisher, known for a series of conceptually complex and visually elegant films, studies Burma in her latest project, Kalama Sutta, moving beyond picturesque travel images to examine the country's political upheaval and oppression. Mixing old, hyperbolic documentaries with recent TV footage, scrolling text, interviews, voice-over commentary, Web-site imagery and video footage shot while on a visit to the Southeast Asian country, Fisher creates a dense patchwork of information that eschews a single perspective. Tales of torture and political struggle against the military dictatorship contrast with garish Web visuals and shots of the country's beautiful landscape. Indeed, Fisher structures the film around this dichotomy, playing off the invitation to foreign tourists to visit Burma: "Seeing is believing" is the hypocritical entreaty, as assertion deftly undermined by Fisher's collection of personal testimony from exiled activists. The film's title comes from the Buddhist Charter on Free Inquiry, which says we should doubt appearances; Fisher does just that with her poetic essay, refuting the propaganda of a government bent on attracting tourists while brutalizing its people.
By Josef Silverstein*
This is a film about Burma from many perspectives and includes many films both lying atop one another and intersecting with each other. Burma and the unchanging land; the many different peoples, both interacting and intersecting, all different and the same. The cultures of the peasants, the village, the military and the new city life. Binding it together are the faces and voices, each telling a different part of the story, all seemingly unconnected but in fact each adding a different part.
This is the story of a national tragedy--of the peoples who never really learned to live together who share the land and parts of the national culture that can smile even as they suffer brutality, cruelty and military rule and are not free to work out their way.
To me this film is a kaleidoscope--constantly changing and each fragment revealing a tiny bit of the story which only becomes whole as the pieces move around their own axes and blend for a moment to become the whole. To me, it says the war and suffering are only a small part of a long and unfinished story of people who will survive and retain their unique identities despite the foreign cultures which bombard their senses but do not change them.
Fisher's camera and sound have caught all of it for just a moment and stopped it for eternity so others can see and share the experience. As I viewed it again, I saw so much that was new; I am sure that when I view it again, I will see and learn more.
*Joseph Silverstein is Professor Emeritus, Rutgers University
By David Raphael Israel
Kalama Sutta has the virtue of delving into complex political / conflictual material in a way that's not exactly polemical, but rather is done with a due & ample sense of paradox, complexity, and even (amid the rather brutal wash of information) elements of credible lyricism.
Kalama Sutta played at the Digital Talkies festival in Delhi last April. But the version I saw last night was probably a newer, revised edition -- Holly said this is the 4th cut (in all, she's worked on Kalama Sutta for six years). She also has considered a broader, more fragmentary, multi-screen installation version. But truth to tell, the one-screen version I enjoyed is very strong as-is. Also to note: the DLP projection (direct from a DVCAM tape) was quite good. In fact, the director mentioned that some time ago she had gotten tests done for a film-transfer version -- but what she saw last night looked a heck of a lot better than that. I like tremendously how she mixed up media -- screen-shots from internet, liberal appearances of her own editing interface (looks like FCP I think) -- even DV footage from the darkened cinema-house in Burma (playing a Bollywood film), which was oddly gorgeous; liberal use of scrolling text (a la Jost); as well as old documentary footage (mixed in in ways that somewhat reminded me of what Jon did in Speaking Directly); several interviews (esp. w/ Burmese activists) spaced out thru the work (with due & thoughtful use of subtitles, often even when they're speaking English); along with a lot of ground-level / water-level daily-life observation which gives the whole a strong base (the rivers with Burmese one-oar boat-taxis are visually arresting & memorable). About 2/3 of the way thru, there's a simple shot of a water buffalo munching in the mud -- an image on which the camera lingers in a way that works tremendously in the story-flow: at once (or at last) we're at rest in placid nature, and/or are in midst of an animal monstrousity.
In all, I feel KALAMA SUTTA to be an excellent example of multi-layered work; I especially appreciated how Fisher pulls back into a neutral / contemplative mode toward the end of the film (the final 15 min. or so), in a way that offers some honest/earned relief (according to my sensibility anyway) to the horrors & contradictions & complications which comprise the central material. The crux of the work involves a fundamental contradition in a visitor's perception of Burma -- which on one hand is being marketed as an exotic tourist destination, and on the other hand is (behind the scenes) suffering through brutal dictatorship and a simmering civil war.
Must say (or add): the more I ponder Kalama Sutta, the more I realize that it at once does much justice to, and also in a way transcends the particularity of its material. Arguably that's what one most wishes from any artwork. As such, it merits considerable respect.
Cinema Electronica Forum
By Tom Lansner*
Kalama Sutta: Seeing is Believing is a compelling and kaleidoscopic journey into the little-known Southeast Asia country of Burma. It is a mesmerizing — and sometimes almost hallucinatory — voyage of discovery through space and time that paints both Burma‘s astounding beauty and the harsh reality of its brutal dictatorship.
Kalama Sutta builds around superb images shot inside Burma by filmmaker Holly Fisher that capture an exotic otherworldliness sustained by the country‘s long isolation. These images of a „golden land“ are Fisher‘s tableau for the disturbing realities of repression and suffering that are today visited on Burma‘s diverse peoples. Fascinating archival and contemporary footage provide context for Burma‘s colonial past and dictatorial present. Interviews with Burmese who have escaped to exile offer extraordinary human insights to the brutishness of the army junta and the bravery of people who have dared oppose it.
The international movement to support human rights and democracy in Burma, and the internet technologies that have helped it grow, are also showcased, from web video of Burmese democracy leader, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, to the signing of a Burma sanctions bill by New York City Mayor Rudolph Guiliani.
Kalama Sutta is not a routine, easily-classified or even „easy“ film. It commands the viewers‘ attention, but also demands their engagement, and their active „seeing.“ Images and information are layered and build toward a deeply empathetic vision of peoples who inhabit a land of thousands of shining pagodas, and survive at the point of hundreds of thousands of bayonets. „A nation dying a slow death,“ asks a Burmese democracy activist interviewed in Kalama Sutta. „How do you get that on camera?“ Fisher somehow manages to do just that, but with a human face that also allows us hope for Burma‘s eventual revival.
* Professor Columbia University, School of International and Professional Affairs, New York City. Former Asia correspondent London Observer.
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