The 15th annual Documentary Film Series at Oklahoma City University will conclude at 2 p.m. April 28 with Robert H. Lieberman’s “They Call It Myanmar: Lifting the Curtain.”
The screening is free to the public and will be held in the Moot Court Room in Sarkeys Law Center at N.W. 23rd Street and Kentucky Avenue. It is sponsored by the Thatcher Hoffman Smith Endowment Fund.
Shot clandestinely over a three-year period in the second-most isolated country in the world — Burma — “They Call It Myanmar” lifts the curtain to expose the everyday life in a land that has been held in the iron grip of a brutal military regime for 48 years. Culled from more than 200 hours of striking images, the film interweaves footage of this little-seen nation with interactions with its people, including an interview with the recently released Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi.
Though Burma has tumbled from being one of the most prosperous and advanced countries in Southeast Asia to being one of the world’s poorest, the film shows a country and people of beauty, courage and hope.
Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times called the film “A thing of beauty: its cinematography, music and contemplative words make it not an angry documentary but more a hymn to a land that has grown out of the oldest cultures in Asia.”
The documentary series title, “3 Measures of Time,” comes from the title of a poem by National Book Award winning poet Terrance Hayes, who gave a reading at OCU April 3.