Marionette master U Sein Aye Myint has practised his art for more than forty years, continuing the traditional skills passed down from his father. But the Covid pandemic and the military coup have prevented him and his puppets from performing. When the roof of his small workshop in Yangon’s North Dagon starts leaking in the monsoon, he has to clamber up to fix it himself to ensure his beloved puppets do not get wet. Observing him with age-old wisdom in their eyes, his puppets seem to sense all the things that are weighing heavily on his mind: his lack of income, his precarious future – and just how much he misses his audience.
A young Burmese woman who was trafficked to China and sold into marriage tells her story. Based on the real-life protagonist’s words and beautifully rendered in pen-and-ink, this animation portrays a woman torn between her love for the child she was forced to bear and her longing for the country to which she may never be able to return.
The breasts are in place, the feathers are smoothed, off to the date! Her daughter does not comprehend the ritual of desire yet … Erotically crude, with pointed beaks in the conflicts.
I grew up in Yangon. In February 2021, my dreams came to an end. My mother said: “Son, wake up. The military has taken over the country”. The days got darker. The window in my narrow room and the piece of sky I watched seemed to be the only freedom I had left. I wanted to say something about this new undercurrent in my life. I wrote things down, recorded my voice, and searched for images that might reflect my feelings and those of other young people. And now there is a film which conveys what it's like to lose the ground beneath your feet.
How do you restitute self-images? A lucid, thought-provoking essay about the Congo, the far-reaching dimensions of colonial power and the (re-)privatisation of identity.
The film Lumène is based on in-depth research into photographic archives taken in the heart of the Belgian Congo between 1938 and 1939 by the German ethnographer and anthropologist Hans Himmelheber. These archives are kept at the Rietberg Museum in Zurich.
In this first part, Lumène: Privatisation, director David Shongo, in collaboration with the traditional chiefs of Lusanga, Mukedi and Feshi, analyses how photography was used as a tool of colonial domination and how it contributed to a process of privatisation of the imaginary, images, cultural heritage and spaces. These analyses raise current issues such as restitution, reparation and the domination of knowledge.
Built in the 19th century, this Tamil Hindu temple in Thanlyin, across the Bago River from Yangon, is unique in the largely Buddhist Myanmar: this is a place where people from different religious backgrounds come to pray in the hope that their wishes will be fulfilled. Fortune-teller “Yellow Mother” is one of four inhabitants of Pilikan village who – in between lively spectacles of leaping cows and cow-catching – explain what the temple and its rituals mean to them.
DOK Industry is realised with the support of Creative Europe MEDIA Programme of the European Union, the Mitteldeutsche Medienförderung (MDM) and the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media upon a Decision of the German Bundestag.