Burma (or Myanmar) has been edging out of isolation; recently, Barack Obama became the first U.S. President to visit the Asian nation and the country’s opposition leader, Nobel Prize-winner Aung San Suu Kyi, is free after years of house arrest.
Directed by Cornell physics professor, novelist and occasional filmmaker Robert H. Lieberman, They Call It Myanmar: Lifting the Curtain is a fascinating documentary of a land whose rulers have restricted contact with the outside world since the 1960s. Burma is free of transnational corporations, but the military regime, a secretive and sinister cabal, have allowed the once prosperous economy to crumble into bare subsistence. Buddhist monasteries have led the opposition in tandem with Aung’s political party. Perhaps Aung’s international acclaim has forced the government to begin reforms, but as Lieberman points out, the Burmese generals give few speeches and barely communicate with their own people or foreigners. Their motives are hard to discern.
They Call It Myanmar is out on DVD.
