It’s late September in 2007 and on the streets of Rangoon unarmed student demonstrators are facing off against the might of the Burmese Army. It is the height of the so-called Saffron Revolution, and the students, emboldened by the support of the country’s Buddhist monks, are protesting against the repressive military junta that has ruled Burma for more than 45 years. Their chanting and banner-waving is being filmed by a Japanese cameraman, a so-called video journalist, in shorts and a T-shirt. The soldiers, however, suddenly charge. One of them, rifle raised, runs over to the unsuspecting Japanese journalist and callously shoots him in the head, dead. This is state justice, Burmese style.

The blatant murder of 50-year-old Kenji Nagai might have remained an unfortunate statistic (it was the result, according to Burmese officials, of a “stray” bullet) had it not been for the bravery of other local “VJs” on the streets of Rangoon that day, and who filmed Nagai’s death while putting their own lives at risk. This small group of camcorder-wielding activists are the subject of a galvanising new documentary, Burma VJ: Reporting from a Closed Country. Constructed largely from hastily snatched fragments of footage, stolen by a team of Rangoon-based VJs during the tumult of September 2007, it’s a guerrilla portrait of a country in crisis and a testament to the power of citizen journalism.

“This is a new kind of documentary completely,” says 44-year-old Anders Ostergaard, the movie’s Danish director. “It is an alliance between the intelligence of barefoot reporters on the ground and my experience as a director of how to put a 90-minute film together.” The movie was originally conceived in early 2007, Ostergaard says, as a “year in the life” of a single Burmese video journalist — referred to as “Joshua” in the documentary to protect his identity from the ruthless yet publicity-shy junta. However, thanks to the attempted revolution, and the subsequently savage state reaction, the film became wider in scope and more focused in attack.

“I realised that it wasn’t going to be about me any more,” Joshua says, speaking from a secret location on the Thai-Burmese border. “It was to be about all the journalists in Burma fighting for freedom of expression, and about all the people, too, and the hardships they face every day under the generals.” Joshua, a 29-year-old college graduate from rural Burma, describes the pressure of life on the front line of video journalism. “With sinister, plain-clothed M. I. agents (Myanmar Intelligence) at all potential political flashpoints, the mere sight of a camera means an instant arrest,” he says. “In situations like this it’s too emotional to think about your safety. You’re afraid, you don’t have time to think, so you just press the record button and keep focused on the situation, knowing that we must let people in the world know what’s going on inside Burma.”

Joshua, who was forced to flee to Thailand after he was spotted filming the arrest of the labour activist Su Su Nway, says that the highly stressful daily reality of the VJ’s job and the attendant fear that it engenders do not usually sink in until night. “You never relax,” he says. “Even now, in Thailand, at night, whenever I hear a motorcycle pass, the chosen vehicle of the military in Rangoon, I wake up sweating.”

In September 2007 he continued to orchestrate an anti-government media campaign from across the border, gathering footage from a ten-person team of VJs, and sending it (via internet and courier) to a base station in Oslo, called The Democratic Voice of Burma. From there the footage was disseminated around the globe and provided the visual commentary for an increasingly brutal state clampdown — one of the most disturbing images was that of a dead, orange-robed monk floating face down in a river, a symbol of a broken national dream and a hint of the terrors that go unseen behind high barracks walls.

The documentary, Joshua explains, which inserts all this footage, and more, into a rolling narrative, is something more than merely a collation of old news clips. “News is about giving you information,” he says. “But documentaries make you think. Hopefully people will think after seeing this, and then even do something about it.” Ostergaard agrees. “We’re using this footage in a new way,” he says. “We’re connecting the audience more, removing the exotic distance, and making them realise that it’s not about monks walking around in some remote Asian country but about totally modern people with modern aspirations.”

And yet the big surprise in the finished Burma VJ is in the emotional wallop that it packs. Whether it’s the handsome young student protester shouting, “Those of you who are not afraid to die, come with me to the front!” or a glimpse of the monks, bowing before the heavily guarded opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, or simply the sight of a previously enervated populace suddenly finding its voice, this is a film of moving human drama as well as political ire. “But it has to move you,” says Ostergaard, who unapologetically uses soundtrack music, plot structure and reconstructed conversations to this effect throughout. “It has to be an emotional experience. I’m not doing journalism here, but expressing reality in a way that will put you right there, totally.”

He hopes that the film, which has already been screened privately for Hillary Clinton and members of the UK Government, will help to increase Western scrutiny of the Burmese regime (which has proposed new “elections” for 2010). He notes that Burma VJ has become a template for new film-making methods. “This will be quickly picked up by others,” he says. “Because the phenomenon of VJs is popping up everywhere. We’ve seen it during the Iran protests; in principle, you could make the same project about Iran.”

Joshua, meanwhile, lives under constant threat of being kidnapped by Burmese snatch squads – the area of Thailand in which he lives is, Ostergaard says, “crawling with Burmese agents”. Nonetheless, Joshua says, with quiet resignation, the VJ business is booming. “A lot more people are contacting me and are willing to take the risk now,” he says, “because they know that the images they make can help to make a change. We’ve a stronger network now than even before the revolution.”

He is cautiously optimistic about the long-term fate of Burma, and says that his ultimate ambition is to return to his family and his home farming village in Burma. And do what? “I’ll make documentaries.” Naturally.

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