Burma Project Grantee Featured in Academy Award-Nominated Documentary

On February 2, the film Burma VJ: Reporting from a Closed Country garnered an Academy Award nomination for Best Feature Documentary. Burma VJ follows undercover stringers working for longstanding Open Society Institute grantee Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB) as they attempt to record footage of the military junta’s crackdown on Buddhist monks, nuns, and other peaceful demonstrators in September 2007.

The Open Society Institute Burma Project/Southeast Asia Initiative was an early donor of DVB and continues its support in partnership with the OSI Media Program. After the military arrested dozens of “video journalists,” OSI funded DVB to train more roving underground reporters, thereby expanding the network to more than 100 working inside the military-ruled country today.

“DVB journalists have chosen to risk imprisonment within the walls of terrifying places like Insein (Rangoon’s notorious state prison) in order to battle against the nefarious prison without walls that Burma has become for its people,” says Khin Maung Win, deputy executive director of DVB. 

This year, DVB journalists will utilize their expanded coverage to monitor, poll, and report on the military’s planned elections. Most importantly, with OSI support DVB has been able to create a small security fund to assist detained and arrested journalists, as well as their families. Already this fund has proven to be integral to the work of DVB networks inside Burma as it not only supports journalists working directly in the line of fire, but also contributes to preventive measures and training in various risk-reduction techniques.

“In 1998, more than 3,000 peaceful demonstrators were gunned down by Burma’s military regime," Khin Maung Win said. "In the absence of a free media, images of the victims were unable to reach the international community.”

Today, with over 100 undercover video journalists working inside Burma, the stories of freedom fighters across the country are being captured, archived and disseminated to the world by Burma’s independent media outlets such as DVB, The Irrawaddy, and Mizzima.

Burma VJ has won more than 40 international awards so far, including two awards at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. The 82nd Academy Awards will air internationally on March 7, 2010, from Hollywood, California.