Abstract:

This powerful and universally acclaimed documentary explores the revolutionary movement fitghting for democracy in Burma and depicts how young people, in particular, are affected by the human rights abuses of Burma's dictatorial military government, the State Law and Order Restoration Council. This regime forcibly over threw Burma's free 1990 election, when the Bhurmese people voted overwhelmingly for the National League of Democracy, the party of nonviolence advocate and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi. Burma Diary focuses on a young man, Tint Aung, who in college was active in the protest movement, but who has since been driven by the oppressive regime into exitle in the jungle along the border of Burma and Thailand. As the film chronicles four harsh yearrs of Tint Aung's struggle to survive, it provides a passionate and at times heartbreaking study of the hopes of and the abstacles facing the Bhurmese democracy movement.