Burma VJ: Reporting From A Closed Country Review

Once in a while a film comes along that is almost completely critically bullet-proof. Thought nine-hour Holocaust revelation Shoah was a bit long? Be off with you. Consider Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 a tad self-serving? Found Schindler's List, a touch, ahem, black and white? Keep it to yourself. Some films are important before they are great.

In the case of Burma VJ, quality and clarity are so closely intertwined it's impossible to tell which is which. For those less than au fait with the political situation in South-East Asia, Burma has been ruled by various repressive military regimes since 1962. The latest of these, in power since 1997, calls itself the State Peace and Development Council - a sinister, Orwellian outfit (the 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' author served there with the Indian Imperial Police in the 1920s) accused of systematic human rights abuses, not least keeping opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest since 1990.

In August 2007, the country's Buddhist monks - the only force large enough to even consider challenging the military's authority - rose up in protest. Predictably this "quiet, patient, peaceful rebuke" ended in bloodshed, the monks' request for a dialogue silenced by the vicious monologue of military might. But what's pertinent here is not so much what happened as how we know about it.

An underground collective of video journalists (hence VJ), the Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB) have been filming these flashpoints of injustice and beaming them back into the country from Oslo since 1992. Organised in the manner of a resistance group by "Joshua" (not, for obvious reasons, his real name), these guerrilla journos provide the only alternative to government propaganda. "I just shoot," says Joshua in the matter-of-fact narration that accompanies DVB's extraordinary images.