While suppressing political dissent, the junta is also trying to cleanse the arts of anything it judges harmful to Myanmar’s traditional Buddhist culture, with LGBT themes the most recent target.
By FRONTIER
At the awards ceremony known as Myanmar’s “Oscars”, junta leaders swapped uniforms for traditional longyis and resplendent silk jackets to demonstrate they can still put on a propaganda show despite shedding territory across the country.
Addressing a packed convention centre in the capital Nay Pyi Taw on the evening of February 9, junta chief Senior General Min Aung Hlaing opened the Myanmar Motion Picture Academy Awards with a 20-minute speech laced with religious nationalism.
“I want to make a special request here that when you make films, make sure to prevent the fading and disappearance of Myanmar customs and traditions and prevent the invasion of foreign cultures. For the benefit of the country and the people, use your skills and talents with a national spirit,” the senior general intoned.
The movie industry must work to eliminate the impact on young people of “social networks and unethical media”, he added, in a not-so-veiled reference to exiled news outlets and activists.
Numerous film and fashion awards were then bestowed, accompanied by productions of anyeint and zat, traditional theatrical performances dating from the royal era before British colonisation. The shows depicted a happy and prosperous Myanmar, despite the nationwide conflict and deep economic crisis triggered by the 2021 coup.
Min Aung Hlaing and his wife Daw Kyu Kyu Hla attended the entire five-hour event, broadcast on national television, leaving only when it concluded at midnight.
In reality the gaudy ceremony – resurrected in 2023 after three missed years due to COVID-19 lockdowns and post-coup instability – has only served to highlight Myanmar’s stark political and cultural divisions. Many actors and directors now work and win prizes in exile and support the resistance, while the regime is said to resort to threats and coercion to force some of those still in Myanmar to come and receive the regime’s accolades.
Parallel to prize-giving comes punishment in the form of tighter censorship, and even prison time, filmmakers told Frontier. As Min Aung Hlaing’s speech at the ceremony suggests, the junta is trying to not just stamp out political dissent, but also cleanse Myanmar’s cultural life of anything it considers harmful to traditional Buddhist values.
Similar to previous military regimes, the current junta sees this crusade as central to its legitimacy, following the example of the old Bamar kings as protectors of Buddhism and Buddhist morality in the realm. The resulting repression extends from cinema to book publishing and the modelling industry.
In one of the most famous cases, models Ma Thinzar Wint Kyaw and Nang Mwe San were both charged in August 2022 under article 33(a) of the Electronic Transactions Law for posting sexually revealing content online. The section of the law, passed in 2004 under the previous junta of Senior General Than Shwe, criminalises among other things any act deemed “detrimental” to “national culture”.
A few months later, Thinzar Wint Kyaw and Nang Mwe San were sentenced to five and six years of jail respectively. While the former was released in an amnesty in January, the latter is still behind bars.
This was not the first time that Nang Mwe San had suffered for her modelling. A medical doctor by training, she was stripped of her licence by the Myanmar Medical Council before the coup, in 2019, for posting pictures offensive to “Myanmar tradition”. However, that was minor in contrast with the punishment she received in 2022. The latter may have been exacerbated by the fact that she, like many other celebrities, had taken to social media to oppose the military’s seizure of power.
In another case, the regime’s Ministry of Information announced in April last year that it had filed criminal complaints against the creators of the music video Beer Belly, under the same section of the Electronic Transactions Law, for its alleged sexual content. Soon after, singer May Thu and performer Okay released videos apologising to the ministry and pledging not to repeat their offences.
There have been no further updates about the criminal complaints and May Thu could not be reached for comment. According to her Facebook page, she has ceased all singing engagements since that time.
However, the junta appears willing to turn a blind eye to explicit content by artists who are willing to participate in its public ceremonies and bolster its propaganda.
For instance, the rapper and actor Yone Lay, who frequently appears at events organised by the regime, released a music video in August 2023 called Heyyy Girls that was full of similarly sexualised depictions of women, but faced no consequences.
Ko Thorn Nay Soe, a filmmaker and author who has been in exile since the coup, told Frontier there was a deeper hypocrisy to the regime’s mission to root out vice and promote virtue, given its troops commit sexual violence with impunity.
“They are taking action against music videos for sexual content, but they don’t take any action against their own soldiers who abuse and torture many girls, including under interrogation,” said Thorn Nay Soe, who is now deputy rector at the Spring Film Academy accredited by the parallel National Unity Government. “They are putting on a prince’s head to hide the fact that they are a monster.”
Trampling on the future
The decade of political reforms before the coup saw a dramatic liberalisation of Myanmar’s cultural life. Pre-publication censorship was lifted for print media in 2012, and although it was maintained for cinema and television, censors became more permissive.
But now Min Aung Hlaing has turned the clock back to the days of Than Shwe’s junta, which ruled from 1992 to 2011, Thorn Nay Soe said. At that time, male singers could not sing on a stage with long hair and women couldn’t show their legs above their ankles.
The censors were so zealous that it was often hard to predict what would draw their ire.
“I remember a funny episode in the early 2000s when I produced a music video with an actor wearing Doc Martens boots,” the director related. “When I submitted it to the censorship board, they said they looked like military boots and that he was stepping on flowers. They accused me of portraying the military as trampling on the future of the people, and they banned it.”
After the National League for Democracy won the 2015 election, filmmakers lobbied to abolish the Motion Picture Law, enacted by the former junta in 1996 and designed “to prohibit decadent motion picture films which undermine Myanmar culture and Myanmar traditions”. Filmmakers also wanted a new law that replaces prior censorship of films with a ratings system. These demands fell on deaf ears, but the censors continued to relax their approach.
This has since gone into reverse and, in December last year, the junta amended the law to lengthen prison sentences and raise fines for showing films without a censorship certificate.
The Motion Picture Law says the censorship board must be chaired by the managing director of the Myanmar Motion Picture Enterprise, a unit of the information ministry. Other board members are a mixture of civil servants – including from the ministries of home affairs and of religious affairs and culture – and “suitable citizens” from inside and outside the movie industry. The law grants the information ministry the sole power to appoint members, specify their tenure and replace them “as may be necessary”.
While this basic selection formula has remained unchanged for decades, the board is now packed with military stooges, according to a Yangon-based filmmaker who spoke to Frontier on condition of anonymity. He wouldn’t name the censors, however, and the junta has not disclosed their identities.
While this is not formally required, filmmakers avoid risk and waste by submitting scripts to the board for approval before shooting even begins. The films then have to be re-submitted before release. The censors often order scenes to be cut or modified, and have the power to ban entire films, the filmmaker explained.
“They mostly make sure films don’t touch on politics, and next they check what the female actors are wearing. If a dress is too short, they make us edit or blur it,” he said, adding that, in contrast, racist, sexist and homophobic content is usually accepted. “Even if a character mocks a certain community with hurtful words, they don’t take it seriously.”
Cinema in Myanmar has long been plagued by bigotry, with filmmakers pandering to popular prejudices against minority groups. This doesn’t seem to bother the junta or its censors, who the filmmaker says only care about protecting and promoting Buddhism.
This chauvinism is hardwired into military rule. While Buddhism is not officially the state religion, the military-drafted 2008 Constitution grants it a “special position” as the religion “professed by the great majority of the citizens” of Myanmar.
Ko Shine Htet Aung, a film critic of Indian heritage, wrote a Facebook post in October last year that criticised a new comedy, Have You Ever Ridden a Jeep?, for mocking Myanmar’s Hindu community. But rather than having his complaint taken seriously, he was arrested and accused of spreading propaganda to undermine peace and stability.
Shine Htet Aung remains in detention and Frontier could not confirm whether he has been sentenced. No action, meanwhile, has been taken against the makers of the film.
‘If you tie a tree with wires’
In the name of protecting traditional Buddhist values, the regime is also keen to roll back the progress made on the rights of sexual minorities in the years before the coup. This has affected the publishing sector in recent months, with the information ministry banning 11 books for “obscenity” and revoking the licences of 10 publishing and printing houses.
All 11 books were novels about young gay relationships. The junta said they were “dirty” and could put “wrong ideas” into the heads of young readers.
Match Made in the Clouds by Didi Zaw was banned from bookshops in December last year even though readers said there was no pornographic content and it simply presented the gay characters as loving and warm, while spreading awareness of LGBT rights and how the wider community should treat them like others.
“I’m sad that good books have to disappear because of the narrow conservative outlook of this regime,” one reader told Frontier. “Through these books we can promote education about diversity, but we can’t hope for that anymore under the junta.”
Authors and publishers that have faced bans declined to comment to Frontier out of fear of being targeted by the regime.
Ma Atar, a transgender and LGBT activist, said this censorship had been coupled with violence and humiliating treatment by the junta against sexual minorities. She said this was proof of especially vicious prejudices against people like her, which the generals share with Myanmar’s previous military rulers.
“LGBT people don’t exist for them,” Ma Atar told Frontier. “In terms of discrimination, everything will be the same as under the previous regimes … The oppression experienced in the past will return.”
Ma Thida, a well-known dissident writer who was imprisoned by Than Shwe’s junta in the 1990s, says each new generation of military dictators maintains the same stance on censorship, even if their methods change.
“Under Ne Win’s regime [1962-1988], we had to send books to the censorship board after finishing the printing process. If they didn’t like or understand it, they glued the pages up or tore them out, so the books looked ugly and it was obvious they were censored. Under Than Shwe, they made us submit before printing so that the censoring wouldn’t be obvious, and then again after printing. A book had to be censored twice,” she told Frontier.
The 2014 Printing and Publishing Law requires that publishing houses submit six copies of new books to the information ministry after publication, but sources in the industry told Frontier this was rarely enforced before the military seized power. Two months after the coup, however, the ministry ordered publishers to comply.
While this is not a system of formal censorship, as seen in the film industry, ministry officials can still outlaw publications and publishers with the stroke of a pen, as seen with the 11 LGBT-themed titles.
“The term ‘incompatible with (Myanmar) culture’ is used to suppress and block,” said Ko Ye Yint Linkar, president of the All Burma Young Poets Federation. “But if they didn’t suppress our work then art could help develop everything in the country, including our culture, society, the economy, politics and democracy.”
“So-called artists work within the frameworks set by the military, but progressive artists ignore these limits,” the poet told Frontier.
Thorn Nay Soe agreed.
“Art is something that you have to be free to create. Trying to constrain art kills the life of it. If you tie a tree with wires, it will remain stunted like a bonsai tree,” he said. “Under the junta, neither art nor anything else will grow.”
