Return to Burma, Midi Z (Taiwan 2010): San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival

The UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive presents a documentary film as part of the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival.

(Guilai de ren). A Burmese laborer in Taiwan returns home, but feels like a stranger in a strange land, in this rare example of a feature film made and (surreptitiously) shot in Burma. First-time director Midi Z films the milieu he knows best: like his protagonist, he is an ethnic Chinese who moved from Burma to Taiwan when he was young. His fiction film, while preserving an ultra-realistic documentary feel, is also inspired by classic Taiwanese New Wave principles: he uses a largely still camera, with beautifully framed long takes and sequence shots that slowly reveal, with precise intensity, the essential reality of rural Burma at a critical moment of its history.

Written, photographed by Midi Z. With Wang Shin-hong, Yang Shu-lan, Chou Jung-kuo. (84 mins, In Burmese with English subtitles, Color, Video)