Dignity through a lens
Festival of human rights films is another step in Myanmar's transformation, writes Rosie Gogan-Keogh
Min Htin Ko Ko Gyi has battled Yangon's ever-increasing traffic to meet me at his office in an apartment block north of the city's Inya Lake. The Myanmese independent filmmaker arrives late and apologises, then sits back in a director's chair. Behind him hang a poster of one of his award-winning documentaries and a large framed still from a work still in progress about the life of Aung San Suu Kyi.
"It will take a long time to finish that one," says the director who persuaded the democracy icon to take part in the documentary about her personal life by giving her a DVD of a film he made about the use of pesticides in farming. "She [Suu Kyi] is busy, but she is committed to finishing the documentary with me," he says firmly.
The Myanmese opposition leader and Nobel Peace laureate's commitment to the movie shows the stature that the filmmaker has achieved in Myanmar since his early filmmaking efforts.
Min Htin Ko Ko Gyi returned home from a career in engineering in Singapore, where he came by some filmmaking training, to assist in a family matter in 2003. Once back in the country (formerly known as Burma), though, he struggled to make a living.
His filmmaking career started in 2004 with a spoof movie, Maung Yar Zar Nay Win (aka Clone), about the clone of a famous actor. It wasn't a particularly stellar debut. "I turned it into a love story and used his name to try and make money", he says of that unashamedly commercial effort.