Image: beginners course at the Yangon Film School.
First world documentary filmmakers who travel outside their bubbles of comparative prosperity can discover colleagues who work under desperate conditions, in the shadows of dictatorship, building independent media from the ground up.
It can be a moving experience, which illustrates a commitment to democracy we take for granted. One of the places where alliances have been successfully created is ​Myanmar, where English-born Lindsay Merrisen helped to set up the Yangon Film School in 2005 with support from Germany, where it is officially based. Fortunately, the regime didn’t really notice the school, so it worked largely undisturbed under the radar, finessing fiddly problems with permits and local corruption.
