Rare are the moments that scratch at a certain truth of human nature. Rarer still do such moments emerge simultaneous with a vital historical reconstruction, told with brutal honesty through the unflinching lenses of a ragged handful of clandestine Burmese video journalists.
Thus the aptly named documentary, Burma VJ. To the martyred protesters of mass monk-led demonstrations, triggered in August 2007 by an overnight doubling of fuel prices, Burma VJ offers a searing tribute.

In searingly intimate detail, Burma VJ follows the arc of a mass movement, the sudden tipping point that turned fear and its attendant passivity into mass defiance. And then, launching into the elegaic, it turns as tragic as the sudden brutal end of the monk-steered street protests that a diplomat dubbed the Saffron Revolution. As it turned out, the name, like Iran's shortlived Green Revolution, was premature. Unless, that is, one accepts the first definition of revolution, that it returns a movement to its origin.. Wasn't it Edmund Burke who wrote that revolutions, well, revolve?

See it and wonder for a moment at the euphoria flashing across faces of the thousands who crowded balconies and rooftops, or flooded the sidewalks of Rangoon to cheer on the barefoot, red-robed monks pouring every bit like the country's spiritual lifeblood through Rangoon's streets. Ponder for a moment the clenched fists flying, or the courage required to unleash a people's movement in the streets in a society utterly mechanized by fear. Still they dared to march again, after nights of beatings and mass sweeps through the monasteries that augured the blood still to come. And when they were finally dispersed, the students -- always look to the students in Burma -- the students took up the mantle of revolution.

Most poignant of all, the documentary binds together the disparate footage of a network of reporters for the Democratic Voice of Burma. Count their numbers on your left hand. Coordinating their movements is "Joshua," whose narration guides our understanding of events with nuance and sophistication (as a camera pans in on soldiers training their guns at the crowd, he tells us, for instance, that the rank-and-file know the brutality and cruelty of the generals far more than "us". In that moment, we're brought to understand what Burmese mean when they call for reconciliation. They mean, inter alia, the folding into society of the boys who were in this instance ordered to fire on their mothers and sisters. It's small secret in Burma that that the lower ranks of a 400,000-strong army are deserting en masse. Or, if that has proved impossible to verify, rumors are also strong that the boys in uniform feel the deepening poverty of the country as badly as the rest of the population).
With Joshua as backbone, the cameras shake and jump, disappear into a quickly zipped bag, reappear behind a tree to peep at soldiers smashing at the crowds, or rest for a moment in silent witness and solemn salute on the bruised and bloated body of a monk floating naked in a creek, his red toga swirling round him like a pool of blood.


Point being, you don't have to care much about Burma to glean a sense of the courage and might that motivates the eponymous video journalists who braved arrest or worse to smuggle out the word to the Democratic Voice of Burma, and from there, to the world beyond. It worked. The world, for a brief instant, listened. Inside the country, the crackdown left a trail of psychological scars, still so resonant as they weigh the worth of protesting the ridiculous trial of Aung San Suu Kyi. But outside, and beyond, the moment will forevermore be archived among the icons of defiance, the Tiananmens or the smashing of the Berlin Wall. It was perhaps only a spasm, but it was also a mass gasp for democracy and a nonviolent end to nearly five decades of military rule. The legitimacy of the junta, if any there was, was henceforth smashed.