As Burma Vj hits UK shores (my review here), OWF’s Mike Edwards sought out director Anders Østergaard to talk about the challenges of making the film, and how far he went into the dangerous world of the undercover VJs….

OWF: The film looked like a huge undertaking, where did it all begin?

AO: The amazing coincidence was that I was working with these guys before the operation when they were quite small time. They were just trying to put together little reports for DVB, the satellite station in Oslo and I was planning to make a modest film about why they were doing that, just a little kind of existential thing, but as we were producing this the uprising happened and our people, particularly Joshua, were thrown in as kind of a catalyst and was crucial to that operation.

OWF: That must have been a real shift of pace.

AO: Absolutely! It was quite daunting, the original film was just a little film about my own interests. It was my own little project. Then suddenly we had this new obligation to do well with this material we had to put together. We almost had a historical role to play.

OWF: Did being there at the time make it easier to piece the material together as a story?

AO: Only some of it came that month. A lot of it came fairly organised from Oslo, but a lot came later and unlabelled. Some stuff was dumped in border towns in Thailand and only turned up months later. For instance the situation where the guy is shooting from behind a wall, trying to cover some students being beaten up. That only turned up four months into editing! So there was a bit of detective work involved.

OWF: How long did it take to go through all this footage?

AO: Ohhh months! Months. We spent two months just viewing the stuff and trying to put it on a timeline, which was a real challenge in itself because a lot of it wasn’t dated and there was no information on who took it, when and how. So a couple of months on that, then we were editing for about four more months.

OWF: At one point in the film, someone says “People have to be arrested, people have to die, monks too. Our country is different from the rest of the world.” Is that something you felt when you were making this? That you were dealing with a country that was far removed from everywhere else?

AO: First of all I was amazed by the courage and the almost kamikaze spirit of these people to throw in everything that they had just to bring about a little change. Or if not even change, just a little attention from the world. They sacrificed everything. That’s what this is expressing and that’s very overwhelming, you get very curious about what can lead people to this kind of attitude. But it somehow seems that these guys found it too unbearable to grow old under this regime and threw everything in to make a difference. I think it’s a very human thing.

OWF: Another thing I felt had a strong impact was seeing this raw footage, do you think this hits people harder than more professional shoots?

AO: Yeah, obviously this is first hand news and is spectacular stuff in that way. But also because we made an effort, I mean already from the footage you get an idea of the subject – the guy who’s shooting this – because it’s so shaky, because he’s hiding behind the wall, you feel the person and his anxiety, his adrenaline; but of course the way I put the film together was to make it important that you feel the person who is filming this. That’s what the documentary could bring to it as opposed to the raw news footage.

OWF: Another thing is that when you see news items it can be very easy for people outside of these events to forget. Do you think films like this can contribute to a collective memory of events like this?

AO: Definitely, what I was trying to do was take out the ‘exotic’ of this and try and show that these people has ambitions that are universal: that you can relate to and you can understand. But also that the way they go about technology is as relaxed as any Westerner would do it. All of this was for me about bringing it closer, so it’s not some place far away where monks are chanting and walking down some streets. This is just the surface of a people who really have aspirations you can share and understand.

OWF: One thing that interested me was whether these VJs ever doubted their actions, particularly because at one point a monk tells them ‘don’t film this, you’ll make it harder for us’.

AO: Well I’m sure they have these dilemmas all the time. Everyone involved has these dilemmas about ‘are we protecting our own people if we put them on TV and send them around the world’ or these VJs can ask ‘am I protecting these people or am I abusing them by telling their story?’ There’s an ongoing dilemma but the decision is somehow that this has to be done and somehow it represents this battle with fear. One of the key messages of [imprisoned opposition leader] Aung Sung Suu Kyi is actually that you must free yourself from fear, before you conquer your your can never get anywhere and that is when the Generals are in charge.

OWF: How has the reaction been to the film?

AO: It’s been bigger than I expected. What I didn’t realise was that Burma is somehow a dormant issue that is there somehow in the back of people’s minds. I didn’t feel that I had to promote this film from scratch, I felt that I was reigniting a real interest in the cause. Not least in the [United] States. It’s been on the agenda for a while but we’re just happy to bring it forward again I guess.

OWF: Do you think that makes it easier to present a view of the situation?

AO: I think it gives you the chance to make a slightly richer cinematic experience. If I was an activist, and that was my entire focus, maybe I would lose some of the finer nuances of the story that I hope is also there in the cinema.

OWF: Would you call the reporters activists, or media producers?

AO: That’s a very good question. If you look at what they’re doing you might say they are activists, that they are PR agents for democracy in Burma because they are getting involved in the news they are covering. They are advising the monks on which route to take through the city to get attention, and they are very consciously working on this media, trying to make this a media revolution. So clearly they do have an activist role, which has been criticised by some people, that institutions like the DVB should not get involved with allying themselves with the demonstrators. But I will say that if you look at it realistically and pragmatically, that’s what they need to do here and now because anything else would be absurd. The battle for freedom is so fundamental in burma that you can’t expect them to keep out of that. I would compare it to the illegal press of the Second World War, who would expect them to be unbiased in what they do?

OWF: Has making Burmja VJ convinced you to stop making films and start your own political activist group?

AO: (Laughs) I was never a political guy really. It’s more my curiosity, or even my existential interest in why they’re doing this stuff that drove me to make this film. I then found it has this political function and I have this political obligation to try to use the occasion to promote the Burmese cause. But I didn’t start out of political commitment to be honest.