"This Is My Country": The Battle for Access and Space in Burma VJ

Daniel Grinberg

During the 2007 Burmese resistance movement depicted in the documentary Burma VJ: Reporting From A Closed Country (dir. Anders Østergaard, Denmark, 2008; hereafter Burma VJ),[1] a citizen journalist is shown filming monks on the first day of protests. The monks, who customarily avoid political intervention, hold their alms bowl upside down to symbolize that “they will no longer take alms from the generals.”[2] Marching with the inverted bowls above their heads rather than in front of them potently symbolizes the upending changes the monks hope to affect and serves as a visible challenge to the state’s authoritarian military power. The images of the monks en masse reclaiming the streets from the soldiers also represent one significant reversal of space that occurred during the resistance.

In my analysis of this documentary, I examine the radical ways in which the repressive Burmese state experientially and physically limits access to public and private spaces and how the citizens and video journalists (hereafter VJs) create responsive strategies to attempt to recover such spaces. While considering questions of the local and global, the national and international, and the real and virtual, I focus on issues regarding the regulation of public and private spaces within this documentary. I have selected this approach because the text itself consistently foregrounds these issues and because I believe that the discourses of public and private can elucidate how these other related spatial formulations have informed the Burmese resistance movement.

Attempts to define the boundaries, ethics, legalities, and ideologies—to isolate merely a few thorny components—of public and private space are complex and ongoing. Conceptualizations of public and private are unique to every culture and are shaped by a given culture’s social and political history, demographics, and geographical setting. Therefore, in this paper, I primarily contrast Burmese spatial conceptualizations and practices with those of contemporary Western democracies, namely the United States and the United Kingdom. I do so because both the footage within the film and the documentary itself were largely made for contemporary Western audiences and distributed by Western media channels. The director, Danish filmmaker Anders Østergaard, also frequently juxtaposes the scenes of conflict in Burma with coverage by BBC and CNN to track the transnational flow of information and to emphasize the contrasts between the Burmese and Western systems of governance.

Context

Before analyzing how contestations over public space and private space are represented in this documentary, I would first like to outline the context in which this film was created. The producer of Burma VJ, Lise Lense-Møller, approached Østergaard with the notion of making a project about Burma. She says, “I definitely wanted to know more about this closed and almost forgotten country—but I also understood, that it had to be the film, rather than a film about Burma, as so few are being made.”[3] Østergaard initially planned to center the documentary around his experiences, but he realized “that if I went into the country myself it would be a story about me and my difficulty in getting to talk to anybody or go anywhere.”[4] This approach would also be risky because of the country’s stringent ban on the entry of foreign journalists.[5] Instead, he devised an alternative filmmaking approach that foregrounds the role of Burmese journalists. Regarding the advantages of this tactic, he states, “I was intrigued, firstly because they [the VJs] would be able to get footage I could never get, and secondly because of their own story: why would they do such a thing at a time, before the uprising, when it seemed totally unrewarding to risk your freedom?”[6] Østergaard went to a Bangkok training camp organized by the Democratic Voice of Burma (hereafter DVB)—the Oslo, Norway-based satellite radio and television network that Burmese dissidents used to distribute independent media to Burmese citizens.[7] At this camp, which taught journalists how to covertly record video footage in Burma, Østergaard met “Joshua,” a pseudonym for a 27-year-old DVB editor. Østergaard planned to make a half-hour film about Joshua’s role as a VJ in Burma, but the unfolding turbulence of the 2007 resistance considerably enlarged the scope of the project.[8]

Though his face never appears onscreen, Joshua remains the documentary’s focal point. He provides the historical background of Burma for the viewer and narrates what is currently unfolding throughout the film. Joshua also offers his subjective experience of the events and shoots some of the footage of protests included in Burma VJ. As a result, Østergaard describes the film in the Burma VJ press kit as an opportunity to “experience Burma through Joshua’s eyes."[9] The documentary concentrates on how both Joshua and his network of VJs and the Burmese junta respond to the citizens’ uprising of September and October 2007. As the state’s crackdown intensified, Burma VJ reveals authorities taking extreme measures, namely arresting and even sometimes executing monks. The film also shows a Burmese soldier shooting and killing Japanese photojournalist Kenji Nagai during a street protest.

Because of the severe risks the VJs faced and the logistical impossibility of securing documentation of several key moments during the uprising, Østergaard chooses to include numerous reenactments in the documentary. This is acknowledged in an opening intertitle which reads, “Some elements of the film have been reconstructed in close cooperation with the actual persons involved, just as some names, places, and other recognizable facts have been altered for security reasons and in order to protect individuals.” Critic Andrew Marshall contends that this technique undermines “the film's credibility and dishonor[s] the very profession its subjects risk their lives to pursue.”[10] Yet, other viewers have reacted more positively, perhaps recognizing the VJs’ life-threatening situation and the vital need to visualize and globally circulate information about the resistance movement. In contrast to Marshall, A. O. Scott calls Burma VJ “a rich, thought-provoking film not only because of the story it tells, which is by turns inspiring and devastatingly sad, but also because of the perspective it offers on the role that new communications technologies can play in political change . . . [I]t tries, with a fascinating mixture of directness and sophistication, to tell the truth.”[11] The film also received awards at festivals such as the Sundance Film Festival, the Jerusalem Film Festival, and the Amsterdam International Documentary Film Festival, and it was nominated in the category of Best Documentary (Feature) at the 82nd Academy Awards.[12] In light of the film’s international recognition and critical reception, it is important to engage with the collaborative nature of Burma VJ’s production in examining the spatial contestations that are represented within the documentary.

Public Space

Because the definition of “public” is so variant and indeterminate, I defer to urban design scholar Ali Madanipour’s terms: “a public space is [one that is] . . . provided and managed by the state and is used by the society as a whole.”[13] Consistently, according to both the film and historical accounts of the 1988 and 2007 resistance movements,[14] the most central and visible concern has been limited access to the streets. As Matthias Reiss writes, the street is “a stage on which feelings and convictions can be expressed, issues addressed, demands presented, and support solicited.”[15] However, as Joshua explains in the documentary, after “everybody in Burma got into the streets” during the 1988 protests, the military authorities severely restricted how this space could be employed and by whom. In an early scene of the documentary, Joshua re-watches video footage of soldiers shooting at citizens as they flee in terror. In this footage, people lie dying on sidewalks or are carried away bleeding for the mere act of public assembly. Soberly, Joshua encapsulates how wary and unprepared the population is in its attempts to challenge the junta, stating, “3,000 people were killed in the streets. . . . We cannot go into the streets again and get shot because we have no more people to die.”

The documentary shows military leaders once again brutally reasserting their control of public space when the protests recommence in September 2007. One tactic the military uses is to announce over a public network of loudspeakers that “gatherings of more than five individuals are forbidden.” When this does not quell the protests, they repeat aspects of their response from 1988 and try to remove people from the streets with tanks, barbed wire, and through the use of firearms and riot shields. The soldiers also construct human barricades at intersections, trapping the crowds and prohibiting people’s movements in the streets. This limitation is an egregious one, since, according to Michel de Certeau, “[T]he act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language. . . . Walking affirms, suspects, tries out, transgresses, respects, etc. the trajectories it ‘speaks.’”[16] Thus, the soldiers’ foreclosure of the possibility of unfettered mobility keeps the public from achieving the “unlimited diversity” of everyday enunciations that de Certeau theorizes in The Practice of Everyday Life.[17]

Figure 1: Soldiers controlling the streets in Burma VJ (dir. Anders Østergaard, Denmark, 2008). Screen capture courtesy of author.

The documentary also focuses on the Burmese state’s tactic of using secret, plainclothes Military Intelligence (hereafter MI) officers to regulate the streets. In the opening scene, two plainly dressed men drive up to a single protester on the sidewalk and drag him into an unmarked van. His fate is unresolved in the film, but from the director’s audio commentary, we find out that the man’s name is Aung Htun and that he received a life sentence for this action. Joshua explains that many people go to prison or disappear this way. In the film, we see MI officers grab Joshua in the midst of a protest when they notice his hidden video camera. In a voiceover, Joshua states that the men took him to an “office of the secret police” and interrogated him to discern why he was covertly filming the event. One effect of this largely invisible control is cautious, paranoid, and extremely curtailed interactions between strangers. As Joshua observes, “If people talk to us and tell us what they think, they will go away too. So they keep silent. Our stories are silent.” The Burmese people’s inability to recognize state officials is reminiscent of what Michel Foucault calls panopticism. The constant but uncertain threat of surveillance, Foucault writes, “automatizes and disindividualizes power. . . . He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power . . . [and] becomes the principle of his own subjection.”[18] Thus, the government also actively limits opportunities for the socialization of strangers and intercultural exchange, two fundamental aspects of modern urban society.

Figure 2: VJs document the secret police in Burma VJ. Screen capture courtesy of author.

However, in Burma VJ, we also observe the people employing strategies to reclaim freer access to public spaces. Because of their numbers and sacred status,[19] the monks are among the first groups to challenge state autonomy in the 2007 protests shown in the film. As Joshua says, they are “the only force in Burma who can scare the military.” In the initial demonstrations, thousands of monks in red robes march down the streets of Rangoon. In a de Certeauian “detour,”[20] they sit down and pray, halting vehicles and transforming contested passageways into sacrosanct spaces. When secret officials try to grab the VJs documenting the march, the monks shelter the reporters and allow them to create the footage we see in the documentary, thus challenging official restrictions on who can use the streets and how. The monks also invite citizens to participate in the protests as a way to embody their dissent and to further challenge the state’s limits on assembly, illustrating the notion that “[d]emonstrations are localized plebiscites.”[21] In addition, the monks are seen working with leaders from DVB to learn which routes to take in order to elicit the most support for their protest and utilize such knowledge of everyday spatial practices to subvert the state.

The VJs also use their cameras to challenge the authorities’ interdictions. Despite facing the very real possibilities of torture and life imprisonment, these self-selecting reporters covertly record the protests and the subsequent response of the state. Their videos help to upset the drastic imbalance of power in the streets and allow the journalists to use techniques such as freeze-frames and slow-motion playback to identify some of the secret officers. As Joshua explains, showing the viewers specific faces of MI officers in the crowd, “They record me and I record them. So we can also define who was who at the time.” Thus, establishing a form of counter-surveillance is also a potential way for citizens to turn some small measure of panopticism back onto the authorities.

Importantly, the acts of recording and distribution pluralize the spectatorial space far beyond the attendees at the live event. For example, when the VJs circulated footage of monks being beaten to the most prominent international news networks (whose own reporters were banned from entering Burma at the time), it rendered every viewer a witness temporarily emplaced on that street. John Ellis observes that film and television’s “quasi-physical documentation of specific moments in specific places has brought us face to face with the great events, the banal happenings, the horrors and the incidental cruelties of our times.”[22] In addition, documentary valuably archives the audiovisual dimensions of spaces that may otherwise be lost or forgotten. Because of the Burmese state’s strict regulations on media access, the VJs’ footage had to be smuggled out of the country, sent to DVB headquarters in Oslo, Norway, and broadcast via satellite for the Burmese people to see a fuller picture of their country. In one scene in the documentary, viewers in Rangoon congregate to watch DVB footage of protests in their own city and discuss what may result from such public dissent. Thus, by filming and televising these events, the VJs figuratively transpose citizens to sites of contestation, again bypassing the barriers of the authorities.

Private Space

While I recognize that there are many ways to conceptualize the private, I find Madanipour’s definition particularly useful for understanding the spatial conflicts represented in Burma VJ. Private space, he explains, is “under the control of the individual in a personal capacity, outside public observation and knowledge and outside official or state control.”[23] Former Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas also argues that the right to privacy “is, simply stated, the right to be left alone; to live one’s life as one chooses, free from assault, intrusion or invasion except as they can be justified by the clear needs of community living under a government of law.”[24]

In the context of Burma, which was conquered by the British in 1824,[25] fully colonized in 1886, and granted independence in 1948,[26] it is also important to remember that notions of privacy and private space are imbricated with the country’s unique colonial and postcolonial histories. Although the individuals featured in the documentary never directly reference these histories in relation to the junta’s actions, I argue that the legacies of imperialist intervention inform the Burmese people’s relationship with private space and that Western audiences should keep them in mind when viewing the film.

In Burma VJ, the uneasy occupation of private space is predominantly visualized through images of the home. Nearly every time one of these domestic spaces appears in the documentary, the view is limited to one room and the camera remains narrowly focused and stationary. In Joshua’s case, his room is perpetually covered in shadows and lacks visible decorations or markers of personal identity. Even in this intimate domain, he is filmed in shadow or from behind to keep his identity hidden from the authorities. In one scene, he visits the equally sparse home of a fellow dissident named Ko Maung, but Joshua is never shown receiving any visitors at his own house. After leaving police custody, Joshua suggests that his solitude is partly a result of security concerns. In a voiceover, he speculates, “Why did they release me? Just to follow me and see what I’m doing next.” Through the use of panoptic threats of surveillance, unannounced entry, and the seizure of personal items, the state prevents Joshua from maintaining a demarcated space to individuate. By denying individuals what American legal precedent deems a “right to privacy,” the Burmese state also inhibits its citizens’ personal development and their ability to form intimate bonds with others in the context of these domestic spaces.

Figure 3: Ko Maung’s domestic interior in Burma VJ. Screen capture courtesy of author.

In response to the demonstrations, the government also imposes a curfew, stating, “Residents must remain in their homes from 9 p. m. to 5 a. m.” This prohibition on individual mobility turns domestic spaces into ones of physical confinement. Even the loudspeakers that broadcast the curfew reinforce the citizens’ inability to distance themselves from the government. The curfew announcements permeate the walls of the people’s homes and sonically encroach on these private spaces. These incursions can perhaps be best understood through Homi Bhabha’s concept of the “unhomely” that he outlines in The Location of Culture.[27] Describing the effects on colonized populations and political refugees, Bhabha describes this form of social and cultural displacement as one in which “the borders between home and world become confused; and uncannily, the public and the private become part of each other, forcing upon us a vision that is as divided as it is disorienting.”[28] Burma VJ evocatively represents such disorientation through the conflation of home and prison. For instance, in one scene a VJ has to film a protest through the bars on his windows, visually echoing both prison cells and the barred windows of the police vans.

Figure 4: Home as prison in Burma VJ. Screen capture courtesy of author.

The documentary represents this link even more directly with the house arrest of Aung San Suu Kyi. Daughter of Aung San, Burma’s assassinated liberation leader, Suu Kyi led the people during the resistance in 1988, and at her first public appearance, half of a million citizens gathered to hear her speak. However, when Suu Kyi refused to leave the country, the regime placed her under house arrest in 1989 and held her captive for fifteen years in a twenty-one-year span.[29] Upon awarding Suu Kyi the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize, the Nobel Committee called her non-violent struggle for democracy “one of the most extraordinary examples of civil courage in Asia in recent decades.”[30] In Burma VJ, this poignant history is shown by juxtaposing archival footage of Suu Kyi speaking directly to the people with more recent video footage of armed soldiers blocking her house. As a cameraman approaches, the soldiers run up and shoo him away. Joshua explains, “She is in the house, but you cannot go and talk to her. There is just . . . darkness.” A black screen replaces the façade of Suu Kyi’s house, which suggests the near blackout of information her arrest has produced and evokes a sense of Suu Kyi’s imprisonment and isolation.

However, parallel to the strategies citizens and VJs devise to recover some portion of access to public spaces, these groups also take measures to prevent the state from encroaching on their private spaces. For Joshua, this means leaving his homeland and establishing a makeshift command center in a house in Chiang Mai, Thailand. This is primarily an act of necessity after officers detain him, and he reluctantly concedes, “I cannot stay in Burma any day longer.” We observe how his relocation grants him greater control over his private space and enables him to communicate more openly with international contacts. Although he says that he is “very unhappy . . . to be in the office, to answer the phones and to call and send emails into Burma” rather than participating on the front lines of his own country, he is also able to publicize the resistance with less fear of government interference and to become what he calls “the center for spreading the news around the world.” Thus, while recognizing the negative aspects of geographic displacement, Burma VJ simultaneously demonstrates its creative potentiality. In this film, spatial displacement offers new perspectives and critical distance for dispossessed individuals, as well as the motivation to recast the pain and disruption of their uprooting into productive acts to reform their homeland.

The other primary way the VJs and other citizens transgress the limits of private space onscreen is through the use of modern communication technologies. We see Joshua coordinating with other dissidents and learning about recent developments in the Burmese streets through the use of Google Talk and the Internet. As Hamid Naficy points out in Home, Exile, Homeland, “For many cosmopolitan ‘homeless’ exiles who are physically displaced, an Internet homepage is an attractive method for becoming discursively emplaced.”[31] He also cites “the intriguing possibilities for liberatory diasporic . . . practices” that cyber-communities offer users in exile.[32] However, while accessing the Internet in most countries is a quotidian and unremarkable act, the Burmese state regulates digital space perhaps as rigorously as physical space, and violations of online access and expression are subject to severe prison sentences. In 2006, before the protests documented in the film took place, Reporters Without Borders, a nonprofit organization that advocates for journalistic freedom, considered Burma one of fifteen “black holes in the Internet” and observed that it was moving from an Internet to an Intranet.[33] The state banned foreign email providers such as Gmail and Yahoo! to compel users to resort to a censored, monitored domestic provider. The state also banned Voice over Internet Protocol services like Google Talk and Skype and utilized filtering software to heavily restrict general content to users. In addition, state authorities cut off Internet access entirely in 2006 to circumvent protests over their extension of Aung San Suu Kyi’s house arrest and used the same tactic in 2007 to attempt to quash the resistance movement (“Internet Increasingly Resembles an Intranet as Foreign Services Blocked,” 2007). In this context, Joshua’s relocation to Thailand is not only a way to sustain a safer, more private physical space, but it also enables him to enjoy newfound freedom in his digital practices within that space. In the documentary, we can observe that the VJs remaining in Burma are still somehow able to chat with Joshua on Google Talk. This suggests that these dissidents may be using technological circumventions like tunneling techniques or proxy servers to bypass government censorship and regain a precious zone of privacy.

Ultimately, it can be said that the 2007 resistance movement depicted in Burma VJ did indeed catalyze slow but profound changes in Burma, particularly in terms of citizens’ access to public and private space. In the immediate aftermath of the September and October protests in 2007, the government agreed to meet with opposition leaders. More sweeping changes have subsequently occurred, including the release of Aung San Suu Kyi and hundreds of other political prisoners,[34] Suu Kyi’s state-recognized election to Parliament and her subsequent world tour,[35] and Barack Obama becoming the first sitting US President to visit the nation.[36] The government also unblocked foreign websites such as YouTube, BBC News, and the Democratic Voice of Burma by 2011.[37]

However, perhaps the most inspiring addendum for viewers of Burma VJ is the current status of the VJs. As the documentary nears its conclusion, viewers learn that the VJs’ headquarters has been raided by secret police. Several of the journalists are missing or have been arrested and their possessions have been confiscated. Intertitles explain that the remaining reporters have all gone into hiding, effectively ending communications within the organization and leaving Joshua “the task of building a new network from scratch.” The intertitles also note that the arrested VJs are expected to receive life sentences. Yet, on 14 January 2012, the activist website Free Burma VJ announced that the state had finally released all thirteen of the incarcerated VJs.[38] After showing international viewers and their fellow Burmese citizens new, transgressive strategies for reclaiming public and private spaces, these VJs were finally able to assert their own rights to access and experience freer space within their homeland.

Notes

[1] Burma VJ, dir. Anders Østergaard, Kamoli Films, Denmark, 2008.

[2] All quotes without in-line citations are direct quotes from the documentary Burma VJ unless otherwise noted. Original emphasis.

[3] “Burma VJ Press Kit,” 13, Dogwoof, http://goodwithfilm.com/library/films/downloads/Press_Kit_Final.pdf (accessed 3 January 2014). The italics are in the original text.

[4] Anders Østergaard, “Anders Østergaard: interview,” by Tom Huddleston, Time Out London, July 2009, http://www.timeout.com/london/film/anders-ostergaard-interview (accessed 3 January 2014).

[5] “Burma VJ Press Kit,” 2.

[6] Anders Østergaard, “Anders Østergaard: interview.”

[7] “Burma VJ Press Kit,” 13.

[8] “Burma VJ Press Kit,” 4.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Andrew Marshall, “Burma VJ: Truth as Casualty,” Time, 29 January 2009, http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1874773,00.html (accessed 3 January 2014).

[11] A. O. Scott, “Bravery Fills Secret Burmese Dispatches,” New York Times, 19 May 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/20/movies/20burm.html (accessed 3 January 2014).

[12] “Burma VJ: Reporter i et lukket land—Awards,” Internet Movie Database (IMDb), http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1333634/awards?ref_=tt_ql_4 (accessed 3 January 2014).

[13] Ali Madanipour, Public and Private Spaces of the City (London: Routledge, 2003), 112.

[14] See two valuable accounts in Bertil Lintner, Aung San Suu Kyi and Burma’s Struggle For Democracy (Chiang Mai, Thailand: Silkwork Books, 2011); also Bertil Lintner, The Resistance of the Monks: Buddhism and Activism in Burma (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2009).

[15] Matthias Reiss, introduction to The Street as Stage: Protest Marches and Public Rallies Since The Nineteenth Century, ed. Matthias Reiss (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 2.

[16] Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendell (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984), 97, 99.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), 202–203.

[19] Among the 54 million people in Burma, 90 percent of whom are Buddhist, there are an estimated 300,000 to 400,000 monks in about 45,000 monasteries as well as about 50,000 nuns (Lintner, The Resistance of the Monks, 4).

[20] de Certeau, 100

[21] Alfred Dietel and Kurt Gintzel, Demonstrations- und Versammlungsfreiheit: Kommentarzum Gesetz über Versammlungen und Aufzüge vom 24. Juli 1953. 9th ed. (Cologne, Germany: Carl Heymanns Verlag KG, 1989), 47.

[22] John Ellis, Seeing Things: Television in the Age of Uncertainty (London: I.B. Tauris & Co., 2002), 9.

[23] Madanipour, 45

[24] Abe Fortas quoted in Bernard Schwartz, The Unpublished Opinions of the Warren Court (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 243.

[25] Josef Silverstein, Burma: Military Rule and the Politics of Stagnation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 4.

[26] Michael W. Charney, A History of Modern Burma (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 4, 51.

[27] Ibid.

[28] Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 13.

[29] Lintner, Aung San Suu Kyi and Burma’s Struggle For Democracy, 160–162.

[30] “Press Release—The Nobel Peace Prize 1991,” Nobelprize.org, http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1991/press.html/ (accessed 3 January 2014).

[31] Hamid Naficy, introduction to Home, Exile, Homeland, ed. Hamid Naficy (New York: Routledge, 1999), 4.

[32] Ibid.

[33] “Internet Increasingly Resembles an Intranet as Foreign Services Blocked,” Reporters Without Borders, last modified 25 January 2007, http://en.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=18202/ (accessed 3 January 2014).

[34] Thomas Fuller, “Burma? Myanmar? New Freedom to Debate Includes Name,” New York Times, 4 October 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/05/world/asia/05iht-myanmar05.html?_r=0/ (accessed 3 January 2014).

[35] Nick Cumming-Bruce, “A Burmese Leader’s Triumphant Return To Europe,” New York Times, 14 June 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/15/world/europe/aung-san-suu-kyi-begins-triumphant-visit-to-europe.html/ (accessed 3 January 2014).

[36] Peter Baker, “Obama Heads to Myanmar as It Promises More Reforms,” New York Times, 18 November 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/19/world/asia/obama-heads-to-myanmar-as-it-promises-more-reforms.html/ (accessed 3 January 2014).

[37] “Many News Websites Unblocked, but 17 Journalists and Three Netizens Still Held,” Reporters Without Borders, last modified 20 September 2011, http://en.rsf.org/burma-many-news-websites-unblocked-but-20-09-2011,41021.html/ (accessed 3 January 2014).

[38] “Free Burma VJ,” Free Burma VJ, last modified 2012, http://www.freeburmavj.org/ (accessed 3 January 2014).

Daniel Grinberg is a graduate student and associate instructor at Indiana University. He is studying Film and Media in the Department of Communications and Culture. Previously, he studied English Literature at the University of Virginia and taught English in France. His research interests include space studies, documentary, and representations of war. His current projects include analyzing cultural and traumatic memory in Vietnam War documentaries and depictions of North Africans in contemporary French cinema.