MA - Cry of Silence

Pitch

Yangon, Myanmar, 2022: the city is in the midst of a civil war following the military coup on 1st February 2021. Mi-Thet, a young Burmese woman, works in a garment factory in Yangon, far from her home village. Their wages have not been paid for two months and a group of female workers have gone on strike. However, the strikers are soon attacked by henchmen of the military regime, leaving Mi-Thet terrified by the deep trauma of her past.

"I knew that this story would have to be told from a woman's point of view. It was then that I decided to invite one of my best friends, Oh Youngjeong, a South Korean artist, to write the screenplay. With her background in Visual Arts and Psychology and her experience of living in Yangon, she understood Burmese society and its forms of oppression well. We wanted to tell the story of ordinary women and, through their struggle, reveal a darker story of the former closed system in Myanmar. We can't talk of these women's lives without tackling the socio-political context and its issues. There are generations of people who have known nothing but a military dictatorship throughout their lives. That deeply transforms a society." The Maw Naing