While extraction industries were once an important part of Burma’s economy, today others, mainly agriculture, have relegated the activity. Despite that, in the northern part of the country, in the state of Kachin, a group of men endures miserable living and working conditions in the hopes of finding in the mud a small piece of mineral that could change their lives completely. In the unstable social and economic context the country can’t get rid off (including civil wars and dictatorships,) and especially in those mountain areas in northern Burma, those men equal the ones searching for gold in the 19 th century, as they face the harsh reality of everyday life while offering the fascinating spectacle of their manual labor. Without much explanation other than voice overs or texts on screen, and using just a couple of shots that help representing the intimate, hypnotic nature of this task, Midi Z builds a work that is both an everyday record of reality and the future memory of an activity that’s on its way to extinction. LL
Sections: Panorama Competencia DDHHD: Midi Z
G: Midi Z, Wu Pei-Chi
F: Midi Z, Wang Shing-Hong, Zaw Moe
E: Midi Z, Lin Sheng-Wen
S: Chou Chen
P: Wang Shin-Hong, Isabella Ho
PE: Lin Leh-Chyun
CP: Seashore Image Productions, Myanmar Montage Films
Seashore Image Productions. Isabella Ho
T +886 963 094 221 E isabellaho@seashore-image.com
Born in Burma in 1982, he studied filmmaking in Taiwan. He directed the features Return to Burma (2011), Poor Folk (2012) and Ice Poison (Bafici ‘14), as well as such short films as Paloma blanca (2006), Motorcycle Driver (2008) and The Palace on the Sea (2013).
05 May 2015
25 April 2015
25 April 2015
