Category: Film

A small boy cradles his face in his hands, wide eyes aghast at the graphic horrors unfolding before them. Mouth contorted in agony, he calls to mind The Scream, expressionist painter Edvard Munch’s iconic 19th-century depiction of existential angst. The look etched onto his features a mixture of mortal fear and incomprehension.

This tiny figure, dressed in a red shirt with yellow dots – the only colour in an ocean of otherwise muted greens, browns and greys – is a lone spectre caught between two worlds: the heady ‘Golden Era’ of 1960s Phnom Penh, a time of beehive hairdos, miniskirts and psych rock, and the dark, nightmarish netherworld of the murderous Khmer Rouge regime.
One of hundreds of minuscule clay figurines hand-carved by famed local sculptor Sarith Mang for use in the first Cambodian feature ever to win an award at the Cannes Film Festival, this small, chiselled child is a tiny avatar of Rithy Panh. Today the country’s most celebrated filmmaker, he was 13 when ultra-Maoists seized the capital, frogmarching folk from the city out to rice fields that would later serve as their graves.

Panh’s The Missing Picture, which won the Un Certain Regard prize at this year’s Cannes festival, has been described by hollywoodreporter.com as “a deliberately distanced but often harrowing vision of a living hell”. The image to which the title refers is something that has haunted Panh for decades; photographic evidence to embody the crimes of the Khmer Rouge, or his own endeavours to do so on celluloid.

“For many years, I have been looking for the missing picture: a photograph taken between 1975 and 1979 by the Khmer Rouge when they ruled over Cambodia,” says a disembodied voice as the opening credits roll. “On its own, of course, an image cannot prove mass murder, but it gives us cause for thought, prompts us to meditate, to record history. I searched for it vainly in the archives, in old papers, in the country villages of Cambodia. Today I know: this image must be missing. I was not really looking for it; would it not be obscene and insignificant? So I created it. What I give you today is neither the picture nor the search for a unique image, but the picture of a quest: the quest that cinema allows.”

As the film’s narrator, via a philosophical script credited to Christophe Bataille and voiced matter-of-factly by Randal Douc, Panh’s clay avatar roams through the litany of Khmer Rouge abuses and horrors, positioned in elaborate dollhouse-sized scenes or superimposed using rough-edge visual effects. For 90 minutes these bleak, monochrome scenarios, mixed with grainy black-and-white archive images from the regime’s own propaganda files, are chillingly contrasted with rose-tinted recollections from the filmmaker’s pre-revolutionary childhood.

Asked why he chose to present his quest as a montage of images past and present, Panh says: “It came with the shooting. I bought Chinese acupuncture material and I thought I would start filming with this. Then I interviewed a former Khmer Rouge photographer and cameraman in order to know if there was a missing picture, a picture hidden somewhere. And I ended with clay figurines. In fact, I don’t know why this combination of images. It is like a painter who looks for a special light in his painting; a musician who searches for the blue note, the perfect note. The missing picture is the picture which does not exist and which I was looking for.”

Film spools past on the screen. A young Princess Norodom Devi Buppha, guardian of Cambodia’s Royal Ballet and here swathed in the golden garb of an Apsara, entwines her fingers in physical prayer to the gods. Crowds of 20-somethings twist and stomp to the sound of West Coast rock ‘n’ roll. Pristine cyclos pedal serenely past city markets overflowing with produce.

Panh was born into a world of books, music and laughter, his father a peasant who had risen to become chief undersecretary of education. Theirs was a lively, boisterous family: sisters, a mother. But when Pol Pot set about converting the urban population into pre-industrial ‘noble savages’, there was no place for education. The word ‘study’ took on new meaning. As Panh recounts in his book The Elimination, on which this film is based, Khmer Rouge commanders would tell selected people: ‘The Angkar has chosen you. You’re to be sent away to study. We leave at once.’

The next day, their bodies would be discovered with their skulls smashed in.

In using clay models to depict such atrocities, the speechlessness and immobility of each figurine underscoring the collective helplessness of a people being methodically exterminated, Panh finds a way of representing the unrepresentable – the sort of images that might otherwise be better left unseen. Writes variety.com: “These re-creations are meant to stand in for the unfilmed, unphotographed images that inspired the film’s title: the concrete dikes and rice fields where these former city-dwellers were forced to work; the meagre rice yields they were forced to live on, leading to widespread malnutrition; and the brutal executions that occurred on a matter-of-fact basis. The result is a carefully aestheticised catalogue of atrocities that… generates its own strange, complicated line of ethical inquiry.”

Long live the independent masterful way of Democratic Kampuchea’s Angkar
Long live its extraordinary clairvoyance

Propaganda footage rescued from rusting canisters shows a smiling Pol Pot, or ‘Brother Number One’, waving to the assembled crowds. Black-clad cadres alternately thump their chests then pump their fists in the air, shouting well-rehearsed party slogans. Over each image floats the ever-emotionless voice of the narrator: “Brother Number One was inspired by young humanity. The original people – the Jarai, the Kuoy, the Bunong – a handful of families who shared everything in common. By observing them, he understood. Like Rousseau’s noble savage.”

The clay Panh sits with his head bowed in a muddy field, recounting over mournful strings and clinking cow bells the time a sleepy comrade shared memories of the United States’ Apollo mission – a gesture the storyteller was ultimately made to pay for with his life. “On our moon, there is nothing,” says the thumb-sized sculpture. “Parched earth and dust bury everything. It took me years to learn to walk upon it, bare feet on thorns.” The camera pans to reveal clay water buffalo being herded by a gaunt-looking man wielding a stick. “Muddy water trickles down my throat. Little by little I disappear. I’m nothing any more. It is strange to drink mud. The buffalo watch us. ‘What odd humans to drink our water.’”

Of sculpting the hundreds of cartoon-like figures, a process that took Mang many months to complete, Panh says: “Each facial expression was made according to the requirements of the sequence, and according to my memories, and according to what I had in mind, what I wanted to film. Most important was that the expression had to be a human one. The figurine is the depiction of the soul. It had to be embodied.”

Perhaps one of the most disturbing memories in The Missing Picture is how Panh’s father deliberately chose, with great dignity, to starve himself to death rather than continue living on ‘rations fit for animals’ – a small gesture that nonetheless defied the regime. Yet in suspended animation, despite the crimes to which he was subjected (his sisters and mother also perished), Panh – this eminent chronicler of the horrors of the Khmer Rouge dictatorship – seeks neither judgement nor revenge, only to understand. “My film aims to ensure that the deep wound caused by the Khmer Rouge belongs to the past and that the new generation builds her future with confidence in herself and in her creativity.”

WHO: Filmmaker Rithy Panh
WHAT: The Missing Picture screening
WHERE: Bophana Centre, #64 Street 200
WHEN: 6:30pm August 3 – 10
WHY: The film, rising from the ashes of a system designed to exterminate intellectual and artistic achievement, is itself a powerful form of resistance

The year is 2040 and the global recession has flipped the world economy. Asia is enjoying the global power status it last had in the Middle Ages, and the 350-year rise of the West has been almost completely reversed. ‘White ghosts’ – gweillo in Cantonese slang – live hand to mouth, forced to do the menial jobs once reserved for cheap Asian labour, or starve.

Among them are a suburban ‘baby maker’ couple with PhDs in robotics, who make dolls for rich Asian kids while dreaming of creating the ultimate killing machine (“I hear of people who make it to Beijing – and their degrees aren’t worth anything. They end up fixing ovens and toasters.”). A ‘human spammer’ oozes through offices and bars, making cash every time she drops brand names into the conversation; a ‘digital janitor’ risks his health entering the virtual past to pixelate logos in adverts. To earn a single canteen of fresh water, homeless brothers scour the countryside for silk deposits left by giant mutant spiders.

These characters from an all-too-probable future star in new mockumentary, Ghosts With Shit Jobs. The film portrays a New World Order in which ‘the economic collapse of the West is complete and the East is in full ascendance’. The premise is far from unprecedented: in December, the National Intelligence Council in the US published the report Global Trends 2030. In it, NIC Chairman Christopher Kojm writes: “We are at a critical juncture in human history, which could lead to widely contrasting futures. The world of 2030 will be radically transformed from our world today.”

Comparing the scale of global chance to the French Revolution and the dawning of the industrial age in the late 18th century, the authors note that Britain took more than 150 years to double per capita income. India and China could do it in a tenth of the time, with 100 times more people. “By 2030, Asia will be well on its way to returning to being the world’s powerhouse, just as it was before 1500.”

The film, screening at The Flicks with a Q&A session with Torontonian co-director Jim Munroe, taps into latent fears about the rise of the Tiger Nation and won the Best Feature award at Sci-Fi London 2012. Its ghosts star in patronising Chinese documentary Window On The World, which harks back to the kind of anthology films of yore that make distinctly cringe-worthy viewing today (“They have such resilience and spirit. We could learn a lot from these people.”). As Carole Jahme writes in The Guardian, “With no budget and only in-kind support, Munroe decided that rather than struggling to create all the 2040 gadgetry necessary some of it would be mimed. This works well – it is as though gadgets have become so sophisticated many of them are invisible. Some light touches with graphics and momentary sound effects are enough; the viewer’s imagination does the rest.”

The Advisor met Munroe, who has been compared to Philip K Dick and is more often to be found writing graphic novels and comics, to talk the rise of the East, the fall of the West, and sharpening the cutting edge of science fiction.

What made you choose this premise?

You see it in the news: scary graphs, how the West is going and where China’s going, and this undercurrent of anxiety and fear cycles endlessly. There’s nothing really explicit, it’s all in the undertones of the reporting. I wanted to put it into a story context because that’s how we deal with a lot of stuff culturally. I was interested in checking that out in a post-apocalypse that wasn’t a zombie post-apocalypse.

You’ve said in previous interviews that it wasn’t the economic angle but the human angle you wanted to bring to the fore.

I’m not really a futurist in the sense that some science fiction will do endless amounts of research into economic forecasts. I’m not hugely interested in being right about my predictions. It’s a ‘What if’ scenario. I’m more interested in putting characters into power dynamics than I am in economic theories.

The film taps into the latent fear of a global shift in the balance of power. I was braced for something far more horrific. What made you stop short of outright terror?

[Laughs] I’m not a horror guy! I think another creator would totally go in that direction. I’m more interested in the politics of showing how in the future they would be more patronising to us than we were to them.

The hosts of the Chinese documentary made pretty painful viewing.

There are people who, having seen the trailer, have accused me of being all ‘Yellow Peril’ and ‘Asia-baiting’. The idea goes back to at least the 1920s: the idea that the Chinese are overrunning our country. But to me it’s much more about the reversal of fortune. People’s memories are short: when they’re on top they forget what it was like to be on the bottom, at least within a generation or two.

We had a screening in Seoul recently and one of the programmers said afterwards ‘What you’re saying is going to happen, it’s just a matter of when and how Korea will fare given their relation to China.’ They’re thinking ‘OK, China’s going to take over. Where are we going to fall? Are we going to be seen as American sympathisers and thus be kept away from the table?’ It’s not going to be like the Third World, but more like the Second World; like Britain was in the 1940s and ’50s, where the quality of life is pretty low. I thought that was pretty insightful and more realistic than my notion of it being a Third World. We probably won’t fall that far, but we will fall. It’s just a question of how far. I found out yesterday that we got accepted into the Beijing Film Festival, which is a big shocker.

Will the film be censored?

I have no idea, honestly. I won’t be able to check their subtitles, so they might entirely turn it into government propaganda…

Maybe it’ll be a triumph of will and they’ll all start cheering.

[Laughs] Even North Americans admit this is going to happen. This could actually turn the whole thing. In 30 years, I might find myself commemorated with a statue: ‘After he was lynched in Chinatown in Toronto during the famine of 2023…’

Wired magazine wrote of Ghosts With Shit Jobs: ‘Excellent sci-fi isn’t dead, it just moved to the internet.’

It was a $4,000 movie but we intended it to be a no-budget movie, so it was a total failure [Laughs]. We had made a movie before in 2007 for about $700 and it took us about six months but the production values were terrible – the audio and video were pretty crappy, which was really distracting. We wanted to make something where the production values weren’t distracting. Our goal was to do it again but with more polish. We did pre-production over about six to eight months, where we’d skill share with people who were interested in making movies and wanted to learn about editing or lighting or acting; we tried to build a community. We had a huge pool of actors to choose from, but post-production people were very hard to find for free. We looked for people at that sweet spot who had the skills but also had some spare time and were willing to get involved. Our special effects person’s day job is working on movies like Resident Evil and Scott Pilgrim – big-time studio stuff – but she was really fond of our script.

Is this the future of filmmaking?

I’m a graphic novelist; I only got involved in making movies when it could be done for free. I enjoy the collaborative process, but I don’t like the culture at all. I think it’s a terrible culture. It’s so calcified; there are such standard ways of doing things and there’s a very conservative element that’s only interested in keeping things the way they are. I find that all terribly boring. The fun thing for me is to try to prove people wrong when they say you can’t do anything on a budget less than $1 million. It is possible; I’m going to keep making movies like this and I think more and more people are going to as well. If I want to write something that’s totally out of my imagination, I can write a book, but if I want to write a film that can economically be done, this is how to do it.

One of the techniques that kept costs down was using mime rather than special effects, which gives the film a certain theatrical feel.

It was definitely a choice because at some point we could have added effects. We only have them when the characters are in-world – when there’s visual feedback from the overlays and you can see stuff, otherwise we figured they’d have better privacy settings than Minority Report. I mean, someone’s going to be looking over Tom Cruise’s shoulder when he’s on the subway, so it made sense that it would be fairly invisible. The doctor – I know him from high school and he’d been doing some concept acting – he’s an artist and there’s a certain spatial intelligence he has that artists often have in terms of being able to picture things and turn them around in their head and get them right. He really stood out. The only direction we gave the actors was ‘Imagine there’s a giant iPhone in front of you. How would you interact with it?’

Given that you weren’t politically or economically eulogising, what do you hope people will take away from this film?

There’s definitely a political point to the thing, but it’s not on a country basis. It’s analysing that well-meaning documentarian who ultimately is almost predatory, turning people’s misery into a kind of consumer product. That’s something I’ve always had a problem with in documentaries and it’s so easy to fall into that. ‘Aren’t these people sad?’

Speaking of which, another powerful motif repeated throughout the film is that of a hamster in a ball. I know how that hamster feels.

[Laughs] It’s about the notion that people can cope with adversity and tell stories to themselves as to why their job isn’t so shitty; how they rationalise things. You see documentaries on the garbage man who thinks he’s an archaeologist: ‘People throw this away, but it’s history!’ That, for me, is at once uplifting and pathetic. It’s such a complicated thing. I was interested in trying to capture that and getting people to think more critically when they watch documentaries. There’s also an undercurrent, with the baby maker who ends up in jail and eventually blows up the cameraman with a battlebot; that’s a cautionary thing. It’s about someone who has ambition and talent but is just boiling in their own juices. There are a lot of people today who are cut off from all sorts of opportunities because of bullshit bureaucracy and racist policies. You get enough of those people, you cut off enough of those people and there are going to be repercussions. It’s not just a bad idea economically.

How has the film been received by the Asian community so far?

Toronto has the second-largest Chinatown outside of San Francisco. There’s one scene at a Chinese restaurant; one of the owners called just before the shoot. I thought: ‘Oh, no!’ He said: “We’re a little bit worried about the name of your movie. Some of the owners were just wondering about the ghosts part.” They’re very superstitious about the dead. I said: ‘No, no, it’s Cantonese slang for white people.’ He just laughed. “OK, that’s fine.” In a Canadian context you’d get people much more upset about using slang for another race – that would be the red flag, not dead ancestors.

Final words: I did feel slightly cheated when we didn’t get to see any giant mutant spiders.
[Laughs] It couldn’t have been anything but terrible, that’s the problem!

WHO: Sci-fi film director Jim Munroe
WHAT: Ghosts With Shit Jobs screening plus director Q&A
WHERE: Flicks 1, #39B St. 95 & Flicks 2, #34 St. 130
WHEN: 7pm March 15 (Q&A) at Flicks 1; 6:30pm March 20 at Flicks 1 & 2
WHY: A much-needed collective reminder of what it feels like to be cannibalised

 

“I would like to have been together with my family. I would like to have seen my sons growing up. But I don’t have doubts about the fact that I had to choose to stay with my people here.” – Aung San Suu Kyi

In April 1988, at the English home she shared with her Tibetan scholar husband Michael Aris and two young sons, Aung San Suu Kyi received an unexpected phone call from her native Burma. Khin Kyi, her mother and a former ambassador to India and Nepal, had fallen critically ill. By December 28, Khin Kyi was dead and a new military junta had seized power, slaughtering thousands of people in the process.

Faced with the extraordinary choice of continuing as an Oxford housewife or sacrificing her family life to serve her country, Suu Kyi had returned to Rangoon. There, amid unprecedented political upheaval, the daughter of independence hero General Aung San became the de facto figurehead for the pro-democracy movement. Her destiny to become a Nobel Peace Prize-winning dissident was sealed.

Twenty-three years later, on the eve of historic by elections, Marc Eberle – a German filmmaker based in Phnom Penh – secured unprecedented access to ‘The Lady’ as she took the dangerous step into everyday Burmese politics. The resulting BBC documentary, Aung San Suu Kyi – The Choice, captures how Suu Kyi chose to remain imprisoned in her Rangoon home rather than rejoin her family in Oxford for fear of being banned from ever returning to Burma. And for the first time, in her own words, she offers a glimpse into the “personal regrets” she has had to endure as a result. The Advisor met with co-director Eberle, who will be on hand for a Q&A at the film’s Meta House screening in January, to talk military dictatorships, the dark art of resistance and what it was really like meeting ‘Mother Suu’.

How did the idea for the film first come about?

I met Burmese comedian Zarganar here on his first ever trip abroad in December last year. He had some questions about film festivals because he was organising the first ever film festival in Burma, the Freedom Film Festival. I thought ‘This is incredible! I have to go over for that.’ But at the time it was still very tricky as a journalist to travel into Burma. Only the month before, Zarganar had been released after 11 years, on and off, of imprisonment. He said: ‘We’ll help you. Don’t worry.’ I had to get my camera in; I had to get a tripod, equipment, radio mics and all that. It was obvious I wasn’t a tourist, yet I was coming in on a tourist visa. They didn’t even look at my equipment. And Zarganar was escorted out of the airport by the secret police, the same security guys who formerly were spying on him. Now they’re carrying his bags. This is how the change happens. So I was filming this festival with one of Zarganar’s friends who happens to be the son of Aung San Suu Kyi’s chief of security. That was the ticket in. Access all areas. Incredible!

Sounds like the way the authorities treated Aung San Suu Kyi during her years of house arrest. At one point in the film she says of the street outside her compound: “It was like this: open, shut, open, shut, open, shut…” 

It was a very conscious practice. In the version we did for HBO, which is 10 minutes longer than the BBC version, we have more from this former military intelligence guy and he explains it’s like a pressure cooker: ‘If there’s too much focus on the lady by the international community, we take the lid off and put it on the other pot, which is the national situation. And if because she’s got too much freedom that creates too much pressure, then we put the lid back on the original pot.’ So that’s how they do it: rice cooking, Burmese-style.

The first thing Suu Kyi said to me – I didn’t ask her any specific question, I just said’What do you want to talk about? Fill me in. What’s happening in Burma?’ – she started by saying ‘Well, it’s not what you think. You…’ – meaning the West, represented by this whitey in front of her – ‘you all romanticise way too much about this.’ And she was completely right. She’s just a lady and Burma is just a country in transition. ‘What is happening here is just another election.’ Maybe we are romanticising too much, because she’s made this transition from icon and human rights activist to an actual politician. She’s gambled away a lot of her political credit over the last few months with this political mess: the Rohingya and all of that.

You get the sense that some people aren’t entirely comfortable with the compromise. 

Hillary Clinton directly says that. ‘She’s got to get into this business of rolling up her sleeves, and getting into the dirty business of politics,’ which is very funny, I thought, coming from Hillary Clinton. That’s why she’s in the film.

Do you feel the way Suu Kyi is viewed, not just by the West but by her own people, is going to change?

It has changed already. There are lots more voices now in Burma that are critical of her – in her own ranks, her own party, too. U Tin OO, deputy leader of the NLD, says in the film that she’s made a deal with President Thein Sein, not the government. I know that when she met the president’s wife, they hugged and were crying. The president’s wife said ‘It is so good to finally have you with us.’ Suu Kyi really trusts the wife; that’s why she trusts Thein Sein. But as U Tin OO says, she still doesn’t trust the government. What remains is this toxic legacy of 40 years of totalitarian dictatorship. And like the Khmer Rouge here, it was a senseless dictatorship that completely wrecked the state for the people, who have to fend for themselves.

Does the film have special relevance to Cambodian audiences?

What’s interesting is that the Burmese could learn from Cambodia because Cambodia is ahead in terms of opening up and changing this whole system of governance and society in a very quick, dynamic transition from the Untac days until today – the advance of democracy and freedom. That’s why Zarganar came here: to look at what these guys are doing and learn. What the Burmese can learn is, of course, dependent on your point of view. The government can learn how to get away with shit because the international community won’t act in time. They’re learning already; this is their very clever way of getting Suu Kyi on board their ship then managing to reunite all the ethnic minorities across the board, except the Muslims, of course. Now everyone’s pointing the finger at the Rohingya and saying ‘Out!’ They’re scapegoats. It reminds me of Germany in 1933; the Nazi party coming to power and suddenly passing these race laws – completely unacceptable, especially if you’re a human rights activist who’s been campaigning for the past 20 years. When asked whether the Rohingya are Burmese, Suu Kyi said ‘I don’t know.’ That was her official response and that’s a very troubling answer for me. But what they can learn is that now that she’s part of the government, they’ve changed the press law and there has been a lot of reform; Burma is now one of the freest countries in Southeast Asia.

How long did you spend on location?

It took three trips, totalling more than a month of filming in Burma. That’s very quick for a documentary like this. We knew the cut-off point would be April 1, the by election, because we don’t want to get into the news story at all. We’re not interested in politics; we’re interested in her. We had wanted to make a film about her piano, but she wouldn’t let us upstairs; she wouldn’t let us film the piano, she wouldn’t let us film her playing the piano. She was very uncooperative; didn’t help us in any way.

In one scene, when Suu Kyi opens her compound to the press, you film her protesting that people are geting too close without permission. Behind the public image is a very private woman, it seems.

She’s a human being; very vulnerable, very scarred and traumatised. Her housekeeper says that every year, on her father’s birthday, she laid out all the silverware and looked at it, and she would never go out into the garden during her whole time under house arrest. Imagine! And she would never talk about private things to her housekeeper because if she opens that door just slightly, she’ll collapse. There’s so much weight and personal cost she’s suffered. She can’t really give in to that kind of emotion; be a mother, or a wife.

A vital survival mechanism, but it must have taken its toll.  

It’s a very Asian way of dealing with these things. She’s much more Asian than we would like to think by taking her Oxbridge accent into account. The way she runs the show in Burma, and her party, the whole thing is a lot further away from our Western references than we would like to think, most of the time. Between the lines in the film, for example, U Tin Oo, deputy leader of the National League for Democracy, says they weren’t entirely for this election at all. She was, but the old men around her in the NLD didn’t want to sell out for such little power gain – only 43 seats out of a total of 640-plus. If you give away your hand of cards for these 43 seats, they say it’s not enough; we’d rather wait for the next general election in 2015. I don’t want to judge that – it’s their decision – but what’s interesting is that all these guys around her say no, but she says yes and then they’re in.

In one sequence, you show Burmese cartoons suggesting the generals fear her. 

In the rough cut, we had a super funny scene showing a Burmese government initiative. They’re all so superstitious; they changed which side of the road they drive on from left to right so everyone’s steering wheels are on the wrong side now, and they didn’t manage to change the traffic signs in time so they had lots of accidents and many people died. And they changed the numbers on the currency denomination to nine, wiping out people’s savings overnight. What they did in the sequence was a tree planting initiative across the whole of Burma; every commune was forced to plant this particular kind of tree called Kyat Suu, which is the inversion of Suu Kyi. They wanted to negate her power using black magic by planting this tree across the country. This is how far they go in order to keep her powers at bay.

Former military intelligence officer Major Aung Lin Htut says General Than Shwe and Khin Nyunt “were inexperienced and not clever enough; they were not capable of negotiating with Suu Kyi”.  

Than Shwe lacked the necessary sophistication to deal with this woman who was so stubborn; fighting for her stance. I’d imagine anybody would have a hard time dealing with her.

Did you have a hard time dealing with her?

[laughs] Yes, very much so.

But you’ve had what many people haven’t – access to this extraordinary icon. What impressions were you left with?

Like every human being, the personal image is much different than the iconic image. How can you be an icon in the first place? You can’t. It’s not fair to the person, because you can never live up to the expectations the world has. As I said, she doesn’t like to talk about private things such as her family, yet she agreed to the first interview – which we use throughout the film, the one where she’s in the yellow dress – where she says it all. Never, before or after, was she willing to reply to any question directed at her private life. ‘If it’s not about politics, don’t even ask me.’

You can sense the pain she’s had to endure in her personal life.

I understood where she was coming from, being so hardened and difficult to deal with, or very grumpy towards us at times. We asked her to tell us some personal stories about what it was like returning to Burma in 1988, but she said: ‘No, this is far too serious. This is politics and I will not tell stories.’ We did three interviews with her, but could only really use one.

Much of the film seems more about what isn’t said, most notably the interview with her youngest son, Kim, who – and I hesitate to say this – seems damaged.

I had the same impression. We approached him and he was very shy and at first reluctant to meet. He eventually met with BBC director Angus McQueen and was a genuinely nice guy. He lives on a barge in Oxford. That moment when he stands up and walks out of the frame, this is so strong because it gives you the sense that there are gaps and pain. That’s why this film is so interesting. That’s the story: the human drama. It’s something tragic.

WHO: The face of Burmese democracy
WHAT: Aung San Suu Kyi – The Choice film screening
WHERE: Meta House, #37 Sothearos Blvd
WHEN: 7pm January 6
WHY: “People ask me about what sacrifices I’ve made. I always answer: I’ve made no sacrifices, I’ve made choices.” – Aung San Suu Kyi

 

In 1979, while filming an episode of Life on Earth with the BBC’s Natural History Unit, a young David Attenborough – today the world’s most famous natural history film-maker – came face-to-face with what were then the world’s most famous macaques. On a tiny offshore island in Japan, the naturalist – sporting rolled-up denims – delivered his piece de camera barefoot as dozens of these Old World primates swarmed his ankles. The troop had become famous for what he described as “making some remarkable changes in their behaviour”.

“For a long time, people thought that the way creatures like these feed was largely instinctive. But then in 1952, scientists visited this island and in order to entice them out into the open so that they could observe them more clearly, they started offering them sweet potatoes…” [At this point in the clip, one particularly bold macaque swipes a sweet potato from the presenter’s hand, trots across the beach to a shallow pool, dips the potato into the water and gives it a vigorous scrub.]

“After about a year, a young female called Emo began to take her roots down to a pool and wash off the sand and mud before eating them. Within a few weeks, her close friends and family – including her mother – were copying her. The habit spread and, eight years later, almost all the monkeys on the island habitually washed their sweet potatoes. Then a new variation arose. Instead of using fresh water, the monkeys took the roots down to the sea and washed them there – even when they were clean already. Perhaps they simply liked salt on their potatoes.”

It would not be the last time macaques, second only to humans in terms of geographical distribution, made the international headlines. Last year, award-winning photographer David Slater left his camera unattended at a national park in Indonesia. Before long, an inquisitive rare crested black macaque – mesmerised by her reflection in the lens – had seized the camera and somehow shot a splendid self-portrait, complete with goofy grin.

Macaques’ closeness to us, hinted at in such hijinks, has made possible extraordinary medical advances, including the development of rabies and polio vaccines, and drugs to manage HIV/Aids. With populations in Cambodia under continued threat from illegal hunting, Innov8 International is throwing a party tonight to raise funds for a new macaque enclosure at Phnom Tamao Wildlife Rescue Sanctuary, managed by Wildlife Alliance. Break out your best animal prints and get wild to the sound of Afrikana’s conga drums and DJ Wez T. Tickets for the event – sponsored by Smart Mobile, Total, Excell and Asian Tigers Mobility – cost $10 and include a welcome drink and canapés, and there are raffle prizes aplenty. Get yours at The Dollhouse, Jasmine Boutique, Mad Monkey Restaurant or Ebony Tree.

WHO: Animal lovers
WHAT: Rumble in the Jungle fundraiser
WHERE: Ebony Tree, St. 178
WHEN: 6:30pm October 4
WHY: Give orphaned macaques a safe place to go