September 28, 1997 THE NATION: A LOST GENERATION
Roger BeaumontWhat makes young students give up everything to spend the best years of their lives as poverty-stricken, jungle-bound revolutionaries? Bangkok-based Jeanne Hallacy found out over a half decade visiting the Thai-Burma border. Her new film premieres in Los Angeles next week. Roger Beaumont reports.
Burma is one of the very few countries left where the majority of citizens may know less about how their country is being run than the people who live outside it. Yet the Burmese know only too well that the State Law and Order Restoration Council (Slorc), which has governed their lives with such an iron fist and casual brutality for the last nine years, was certainly not elected to do so.It is still hard to reconcile just what happened. On May 27, 1990, the people of Burma went to the polls and voted overwhelmingly for the National League of Democracy (NLD), founded and led by Aung San Suu Kyi. Slorc was at first stunned, then enraged and immediately took control of the country. One of its first actions was to seek out and punish the parents of the students who had defied them. Most of their sons and daughters had fled into the jungle.
"They tried elections," said native New Yorker and photojournalist Jeanne Hallacy, "but the Burmese army, who hadn't quite got the hang of democracy, arrested the winner."
For someone who has just spent five emotionally taxing years making Burma Diary, a film about the students and others on the border who suffered because of Slorc's reaction, her composure is impressive. Hallacy, in her mid-30s, is well-attuned to the dangers that children and young people face when caught up in adult conflicts. In her 20s, she spent six years in the Philippines as a photographer, where she gave up much of her free time to comfort children caught up in the country's internal conflicts.
Why did she decide to make a film about what happened to the Burmese students who fled to the border? "I have a fascination about what compels young people to join revolutionary movements," she said.
Her purpose was to shed light on the motivation, development and perhaps the destinies of those she would meet in the student camps. In December 1992, underfunded and overloaded, Hallacy made the first of countless trips to the border, initially to Manerplaw at that time the Karen headquarters. It had become a shelter and then a centre for the students who were to form the All Burmese Student Democratic Front (ABSDF). The Karen would teach them how to fight.
Hallacy soon met Tin Aung, a university student who - along with the workers teachers, monks and children - joined the protests in 1988 calling for an end to 26 years of military rule. Among the thousands killed by the army were some of Tin Aung's friends. It was the fortunes of Tin Aung and his family that would become the heart of Burma Diary. The border is a hard place. Sickness, especially malaria, is rife. Even finding enough to eat can sometimes be difficult. One Karen mother told a journalist that, while under attack by
the Burmese forces, the only nutritional thing she'd had for a week was a blood
transfusion given to her by a Norwegian field doctor.Hallacy came to know the daily struggles of these young revolutionaries, to understand how their dignity and humour held up against the odds, and to comprehend their passion for what they were doing.
Says Kevin, a volunteer teacher in a Karen camp, who appears in Burma Diary. "People overseas say, 'It's good to oppose Slorc by non-violent means.' But I ask you to put yourself in their position. Your father was taken as a porter and beaten to death. Your cousin was captured and thrown off a cliff. The soldiers raped your mother, six of them at once, and forced you to watch. You end up an orphan. Your sister's been sold into a brothel by Slorc officers in Thailand. "What would you do?"
When appearing on film, the young people and children are shy and polite. Their English is halting but their message is not: We have lost family and friends, the country is divided, separated and battered and it's about time some bad things happened to the bad people who control this country.
In March 1993, Hallacy met Chatay ("Little Brother"), who thinks he was nine when his house was shelled during a Slorc offensive. When he regained consciousness after the shell blast, his parents were lying in front of him, dead. Slorc soldiers took him and it was years before he escaped and met up with a group of ABSDF soldiers. He told the film-maker he was no longer afraid of being killed because "I'm not holding a stick anymore, I'm holding a gun".
The following year, Hallacy discovered that Tin Aung had moved into the ABSDF information department - he had become the father of twin girls and was worried about his babies' future. Decisions had to be made.
As the film draws to its climax, it follows dramatic events as they were unfolding along the border. One camp after another (Tin Aung's among them) was falling to Slorc forces, and he and his young family joined thousands of other refugees on the Thai side of the border.
A year later, Tin Aung was an intense mixture of emotion. Sad because he could not go back to Burma and relieved because he had finally secured visas for his family to enter Australia. In the film, a poignant moment records a Tin Aung torn by the huge consequences of his decision.
Burma Diary, which Hallacy wrote, directed and narrated, is a well-told documentary that primarily concerns the fortunes of one family while illuminating the tragedy of countless others. It is not designed to shock, but does anyway because of the steely and human reality it portrays. The story reveals itself without being forced. It is gritty and sensitive, and it leaves one feeling chastened, centred and incredibly lucky.
It is not a film about solutions - although it hints at possibilities. It is a true diary of a certain time, but is also a work in progress that' visually prolongs the echo of Aung San Suu Kyi's own words and present predicament:"Liberty is always an unfinished business "
