Vaclav Havel Award
The excellent “One World Human Rights Film Festival” in Prague is over and awards have been distributed. One of the awards not only carry the name of Vaclac Havel but when I was there years ago, I was told that the author-president himself, from a shortlist presented to him, personally decided to whom the prize should be given. What an honour for Anders Østergaard, among many other prizes, to get one in the name of Vaclav Havel! Here is the fine motivation of the jury/Vaclav Havel:
As a young boy in 1988, Joshua witnessed the Burma military junta’s brutal intervention against demonstrators, which resulted in the deaths of more than 3,000 people. He decided to fight for democracy from that time onwards. Armed with a small camera and a mobile telephone, he and three dozen other brave Burmese from the Democratic Voice of Burma organisation decided to make a detailed record of anti-government demonstrations in September 2007 and their subsequent brutal suppression. Footage of the dramatic events from the cameras of these reporters appeared in the news bulletins of all important global media outlets and for a time it was the only way in which the world could find out about the actual situation in Burma. This impressively compiled documentary offers an in-depth and extremely authentic record of the events of that time, when Burmese overcame their deeply rooted fear of government repression for the first time in 19 years and came out en masse to support Buddhist monks on the streets of Rangoon. Using the detailed evidence provided by the work of Joshua and his colleagues (who risked their lives to do it) this film illustrates the indisputable importance of independent media in the fight against totalitarian power.
Burma VJ – Reporting from a Closed Country. 2008 / 84 min.
