After the Storm: National Cinema in Myanmar

Prior to the military coup in Myanmar on 1 February 2021, a new wave of fiercely independent productions emerged to challenge the political and social status quo in what was then one of South East Asia’s most fragile and complicated democracies.

On 1 February 2021, Myanmar’s military commander-in-chief Min Aung Hlaing seized power in a vicious coup, dissatisfied with the National League for Democracy (NLD), led by Aung San Suu Kyi, and its landslide victory in the 2020 election. Since then, more than 5,000 people have been detained, including the democratically elected Aung San Suu Kyi and members of her NLD party. Her Australian advisor, professor Sean Turnell, is one amongst this number; his crime was working as an economic advisor to the former government. NLD MPs who managed to escape arrest formed a new group in hiding. Their leader urged protesters to defend themselves against the crackdown.¹

Following the coup, mass protests erupted in cities across Myanmar, with the military opening fire on crowds. More than 1,000 people, including children, have been killed and more than 200,000 people have been displaced.

The junta’s treatment of artists, especially those who don’t tow its nationalistic party line, is harrowing. Former civil engineer turned poet Khet Thi, who penned the line, “They can shoot us in the head, but what they don’t know is that revolution is in the heart,” was abducted earlier this year, his body returned to his family with his heart and other vital organs removed, a death certificate citing cause of death as heart attack². He’s one of several dissident poets who have been murdered or vanished since 1 February 2021, and according to International Coalition of Film makers at Risk (ICFR) “more than 100 professionals from the local filmmaking community have been targeted for arrest.”³

In late April 2021, eight directors of Korea’s international film festivals, including the director of the 22nd Jeonju International Film Festival Lee Joon-dong, jointly expressed their support for the democratic movement in Myanmar during a press conference, stating in a joint statement:

The Myanmar military should immediately stop arresting and searching filmmakers, who are trying to resist the military coup and tell the truth. The current Myanmar military coup reminds us of the violence that happened in Korea not too long ago. And it also reminds us of the global filmmakers who formed solidarity with us. So, Korean international film festivals would like to stand with Myanmar filmmakers and support their courage.⁴

The picture pre-2021

Prior to the dire and desperate circumstances of February 2021, filmmaking in Myanmar was reaching an exciting tipping point in its development of a new national cinema: multilayered, nuanced, rich with complexity and deeply political. The sense of optimism described by filmmaker Aung Min nine years ago, talking specifically about documentary but relevant for filmmaking more broadly, has a new poignancy and sadness: 

With the release of democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi in 2010, the age of fear in Myanmar appeared to be drawing to a close. Today, the country’s documentary filmmakers need no longer worry about using camcorders to film in the streets. What will they choose to focus on now? What realities will they reveal? How will they explore a deeper reality than has heretofore been permitted? In confronting these and other challenging questions, Myanmar’s documentary film movement cannot help but take further steps forward.⁵

Painting a picture of Myanmar’s filmmaking landscape and its national cinema, from commercial to arthouse and back again, requires considerable survey, made more problematic by the fact much of Myanmar’s physical film history has been lost due to poor archival storage. The pinnacle of local production occurred in 1962, with 93 films produced. This landmark, however, coincided with General Ne Wim’s coup and the rise of the Myanmar Socialist Programme Party, which quickly established the Motion Picture Development Department (MMPDD) as part of the Ministry of Information, “responsible for importing raw film stock and film processing in its own lab,” while a separate Film Council was created to “control production and content” and administer a strict regime of censorship.⁶

Myanmar’s more than 400 cinemas were nationalised under state ownership – cinemas that formed a significant part of the domestic film production structure by providing budget advances and distribution networks to filmmakers.⁷ The almost overnight evaporation of the means of production, investors, in addition to hardcore censorship and other structural issues such as a lack of human resources, knowledge and infrastructure gaps, including studios and adequate numbers of movie theatres, resulted in rapid decline of annual film production over the decades since 1962.⁸

With the advent of VCRs and camcorders in the 1980s and 1990s, and the subsequent development of digital video recording and DVDs in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the primary mode of filmmaking in Myanmar shifted. As film production further declined from 1990-2010, video production boomed, driven largely by the “influence of popular actors” forcing a further shift into “actor-led film production” focussing on stories that supported a “strong patriarchal system”, one where return profit was assured “based on the popularity of the actor.”⁹ In addition to its focus on patriarchy and profit, domestic commercial filmmaking in Myanmar is one where “racism, homophobia and anti-Muslim sentiment are rampant — the result, insiders say, of nearly five decades of military rule in which stringent censorship ultimately stifled any chance of a proper cinema culture.”¹⁰

The Myanmar movie going public are “fed lowbrow fare by a tawdry film industry, with movies revolving around stock plots and themes and functioning as little more than vehicles for a handful of well-known actors.”¹¹ This approach is the most efficient and safest way to get movies cleared by the powerful Motion Picture Censor Board at the Ministry of Information, which is responsible for reviewing all films, and not offend the powerful military. This strategy, however, has seen the industry grow in terms of domestic output: in 2017, there were 53 local films, almost double compared to 2016’s total, shown on theatrical release in Myanmar.¹¹ But what does this growth in domestic cinema tell us about a broader national cinema in Myanmar?

In Theorizing National Cinema, Paul Willemen posits that nationalism is a “mode of address carefully nurtured, reproduced and policed, ensuring that a specific cluster of assumptions is written into our social bodies from early childhood and repeated with ritualised regularity henceforth” which “seeks to bind people to identities.”¹³ Internal ethnopolitical turmoil in Myanmar since the end of the first half of the 20th century, however, from independence from British rule, through socialist and military regimes to democracy and back to military rule, not to mention continued horrific internal unrest, has made it impossible for Myanmar to carefully nurture anything, least of all a “specific cluster of assumptions” which “seeks to bind people to identities.”¹⁴

Surely Myanmar’s mode of cinematic address exists beyond a narrative focussing largely on racism, homophobia and anti-Muslim sentiment. This growth in domestic cinema also only tells a partial story – the part that’s commercial, industrial and not very interesting. Distinction must be drawn between what’s intended for domestic audiences and made as a matter of commerce, and what comes from a different place, devoid of commerce, closer to margins than mainstream. Fortunately, we are spared the above mentioned “lowbrow fare by a tawdry film industry” with the films featured in this discussion. Willemen says cinema is a “historically (institutionally) delineated set of practices caught within, among others, the dynamics besetting and characterising a national configuration.”¹⁵ In Myanmar, the institutionally delineated set of practices dictating how most films are made is conducive to another kind of cinema, one that underwent a rebirth of sorts in the 2010s, reimagining, perhaps, a new national cinema of Myanmar.

Ma Ning writes that the “introduction of film as a new medium and social institution from the West to the East at the turn of the [last] century, was usually followed by a process of adaptation and transformation in which attempts were made by the artists of the region to reform and reinvent their respective national film cultures.”¹⁶ In Myanmar, this adaptation and transformation was very much alive prior to the events of February 2021, which is especially apt given 2020 was the centenary anniversary of film in Myanmar.

Throughout the 2010s and up to 2020, filmmakers like Aung Min, Than Kyaw Htay, Thadi Htar and The Maw Naing were reforming, reinventing and in many ways subverting Myanmar’s national film culture, turning their backs on the actor-led, video/DVD production and distribution process to present narratives, voices and visions that are authentic and unique. Typically, these are films that would not have wide audience in Myanmar, and certainly not wide theatrical release, but have found (or will find) international audiences via a coproduction process with the Czech Republic and its Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts (FAMU) in Prague, giving them access to international markets and film festivals.¹⁷

The Monk (The Maw Naing, 2014), 93 min, Myanmar/Czech Republic coproduction

A breakthrough moment occurred in 2014 with The Maw Naing’s debut feature film The Monk, a gentle, tender but no less political story about Zawana, a young boy and novice Buddhist monk confronted with the choices of tradition and modernity, secularity and religion, in a fast-changing Myanmar. Zawana enters a small village monastery led by U Dahma. Zawana has doubts if this lifestyle is right for him, but he grows to like the old abbot. The monastery faces financial crisis, monks are leaving for less repressive city monasteries, and on top of that U Dahma gets sick. Somebody must take care of him and the community, but will Zawana follow this path, the other monks who left for a more flexible monastery in the city or leave the order altogether for a girl he likes from his village?

Described by Chitra Mogul in Asian Culture Vulture as a “reflective and empathetic look at the challenges monasteries will likely face now that the country has thrown open its doors to the winds of change and the old ways are undermined by new,”¹⁸, The Monk might not seem like an overtly political film on its surface, however, the choices made by the young monk in the film are nothing but political and deeply metaphorical. Zawana’s internal struggle “speaks to the situation of a country that, after decades of repression, has now to choose a new future.”¹⁹

The Monk

Director The Maw Naing and writer Aung Min both participated in FAMU’s “informal film school” classes in Myanmar, which attracted participants from the alternative arts and activist community. Naing was selected to attend FAMU’s Academy Preparation Program in Prague, and in 2011 they were both selected to develop The Monk as part of the Midpoint feature narrative film program. It was in Prague as part of Midpoint that Min wrote his first draft of The Monk based on his own experiences and observations. It was a process he said was not without reservation: “I am a traditional Buddhist, therefore I was afraid to criticize the priests. I am afraid of karma, about going to hell.”²⁰

Naing’s background as a documentarian is evident in The Monk. While deliberate, his direction is also delicate, complimented by Tin Ein Naing’s often breathtaking cinematography. It’s a film that glides between moments that feel like documentary, and moments that are truly cinematic, despite the sometimes earnest, gritty realism. The Monk screened at the 49th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in 2014 as the opening film for Forum of Independents and has been screened at more than 30 international film festivals including Locarno International Film Festival, Busan International Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam and the Goteborg International Film Festival. It has garnered several awards including the EWHA Award at the Ewha Media Art Presentation in Seoul, Korea (2016), NETPAC Award at Asian Film Festival at Vesoul, Franc (2015), and the Premiere Special Award, 11th Animal International Independence Film Festival, Bucharest, Romania (2014).

The Monk

Despite its global festival reach, The Monk hasn’t received broad commercial release in Myanmar “because its realistic portrayal of monastic life is at odds with the romanticized view of Buddhist clergy preferred by the authorities of this predominantly Buddhist nation.”²¹ When asked how he thought domestic Burmese audiences would react to his film The Maw Naing replied: 

We have lived in a locked-up society. Those who grow up in a locked-up society are different from those who grow up in open societies. Those who grow up in a locked-up society are somewhat abnormal. We ourselves are. We are not frank with each other. We dare not complain even when we are right. Since this has been going on for a long time, there has emerged misunderstanding as a result. Burmese people have a fear, since they were not allowed to think freely. Most of the people who have watched the entire film like it when they grasp the essence of it.²²

Silence in Mrauk Oo (Than Kyaw Htay and Thadi Htar, 2018), 14 min, Myanmar

In Silence in Mrauk Oo, a young man returns to the town of Mrauk Oo in Rakhine state to find out about his father who died in the January 2018 riots. These riots were sparked by ethnic Rakhine/Theravada Buddhists after a commemorative event planned to take place on an ancient Buddhist site was banned the day before by the Myanmar State, which is dominated by ethnic Bamar (or Burmese) Buddhists. The riot also occurred on the same day a repatriation agreement was signed between Myanmar and Bangladesh to return hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslim refugees to Rakhine state after they fled a brutal military crackdown the previous year. Apart from animosity with Bamar Buddhists and the Myanmar State, ethnic Rakhine also consider the Rohingya to be illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, despite the fact the Rohingya have lived in Rakhine state for generations.²³

Shot over two days and directed by Than Kyaw Htay and Thadi Htar (a visual and performance artist who also collaborates with Aung Min), Htar plays the film’s nameless main character, an ethnic Rakhine who makes the journey to Mrauk Oo in search of the truth about his father’s death. Clues about context are immediately provided in the film’s opening sequence: sound design features field recordings from the riots – yelling, screaming, gun shots, broken glass – overlaid by fragments of newspaper reports revealed in subtitles: “12 were injured and 7 were killed when authorities opened fire on the crowd protesting against the … Rakhine state parliament has voted to organise a free commission to investigate Mrauk Oo riot…”

Silence in Mrauk Oo

The protagonist commences his arduous journey to Mrauk Oo by bus, spending the night in a guesthouse before trying to find out about his father’s death the next day. He visits a funeral home where the mortician (played by Than Kyaw Htay), suggests he visit his Buddhist Monk uncle (played by U Kaw Vida) at the local monastery. Both characters are reticent and unwilling to talk about what happened. They remain silent about the truth.

Silence in Mrauk Oo

This silence is indicative of a broader social and cultural tendency in Myanmar. In reviewing Christina Fink’s Living Silence in Myanmar: Surviving under Military, Moe Thuzar says this silence is a symptom of the “reluctance of the people to speak out in a climate of repression and insecurity which has instilled fear and passivity. The fear that their words or actions may harm their families imposes a silence on the people of Myanmar.”²⁴ 

Silence in Mrauk Oo

After a second drunken night at the guest house, the protagonist visits his father’s grave and wanders through the bleak, mist-shrouded and ancient Buddhist ruins of Mrauk Oo, only to depart in silence. Stylistically, Silence in Mrauk Oo personifies the power of a less is more approach to filmmaking, blending minimalism and realism to great effect. There’s no artifice here. Cinematography is stripped back to essentials – available light, one camera and little to no movement – and only serves to enhance the haunting qualities of the narrative’s silence and melancholy.

Silence in Mrauk Oo

Produced by the Ten Men Group, an independent collective of artists, performers and filmmakers founded by Aung Min in 2013, Silence in Mrauk Oo won the Best Short Film and Best Cinematography awards at the 8th Wathann Film Festival in 2018, the first independent film festival in Myanmar, established in 2011 by filmmakers Thaiddhi and Thu Thu Shein, both alumni of the FAMU-Myanmar Scholarship Program. 

Man with the Beard (Aung Min, 2020), 87 min, Myanmar/Czech Republic coproduction, work in progress 

Man with the Beard, Aung Min’s highly experimental and deeply personal debut feature film, is almost like a surreal nightmare tone poem, capturing and recapitulating not only a man but a country wrecked by turmoil. The film represents political, ethnic and religious issues via language of the moving image in complex, intriguing and multi-layered ways. The film was shot in and around Rangoon, in public spaces and places where the cast and crew lived, worked and ate. 

Man with the Beard

The mise en scène is gritty and wet, with Nyi Pu’s powerful cinematography, especially scenes shot at night and dawn, painting a visually evocative picture where location is just as key to understanding the story as the actors and their actions. For example, in one powerful and slightly harrowing scene, the titular man with the Beard (the Beard) breaks down on a street at night in front of the Sule Pagoda in Rangoon, the site where half a million people, including then student Aung Min, participated in the 8-8-88 or People Power Uprisings, protesting against the totalitarian and militaristic Myanmar Socialist Programme Party.²⁵ 

This eerie psychogeography is overlaid with the fact the Beard, himself an ethnic Rakhine Buddhist who lives as an outlier on the literal edge of Yangon, has grown a beard to play a Rohingya Muslim character in a film being made by The Master (played by Aung Min). While Buddhist, his beard means people think he’s Muslim, creating an extra layer of societal anxiety, animosity and resentment. In the scene at the Sule Pagoda mentioned above, the Beard finds a set of glowing love heart head boppers on the street of the square which he wears in an unexpected moment of humour and irony, before going on to masturbate on the ground in front of a large and brightly lit portrait of Aung San Su Kyi hanging on a building near the Pagoda. 

Man with the Beard

While rich with meaning, symbolism and metaphor, Aung Min’s almost guerrilla-style of filmmaking can lead to serendipitous results:

That place where the Beard was lying, it was where the 8.8.88 uprising happened, I was growing up, a teenager, and it’s a place where the government soldiers shot students, it’s a place that stays in my mind, and about Aung San Su Kyi’s picture, it was not there before, just a few weeks before he started shooting somebody put it up there. It was a coincidence. And then it was complete. Aung Sun Su Kyi’s picture in the place of the riots, the mise en scène is complete! That picture in front of the Pagoda… the scene was complete.
Before that we didn’t plan for the character Beard to masturbate – he just wanted him to have a drink or get bullied by the police or something, but it was not enough, and he wanted to show the character’s pain, and the emotion of his depression, and he wanted his character to burst up, so he decided for the character of Beard to masturbate. Psychological suffering, masturbation is very powerful for my action and the mise en scène.²⁶ 

While Su Kyi was a leader of the People Power Uprisings in 1988, going into exile for her involvement in the movement, she returned to Myanmar to lead the National League for Democracy and played a vital role in the state’s transition from military junta to partial democracy, being re-elected to continue leading the NLD in 2020.²⁷ Despite this track record, she has remained curiously absent from and silent in Myanmar’s treatment of Rohingya Muslims, which many claim is genocide including the United Nations General Assembly, which in late 2019 approved a resolution strongly condemning rights abuses against Rohingya Muslims and other minority groups in Myanmar, including arbitrary arrests, torture, rape and deaths in detention.²⁸ 

In late 2020, a couple of months before the military junta, I interviewed Aung Min in a bid to gain deeper insight into his process and methodology.  

KW: You’ve written and directed films – is there a role you prefer, writing or directing, and why? 

AM: I used to write short stories and scripts, but after Man with a Beard, I found out I like making films where you can talk about things you couldn’t just by writing – you can show things that aren’t possible with a pen. There are a lot of possibilities at a filming location. 

KW: Your process of filmmaking is organic, especially the notion of living with the cast and crew during production, working without a script and following the actors around the ‘real world’ to film. Is this ‘organic’ process of filmmaking something you want to explore more of and how much does the process rely on trust between cast and crew? 

AM: The advantage of filming without a script is that I can get scenes that are impossible with a script. It does take a lot of time. You have to review a scene that was made in the morning and then there’s a different scene on the next day. You have to wait patiently for the character to become expressive. 

It’s not that I am doing the opposite intentionally – the way the films are made in the West costs a lot and can be very difficult to do according to a script. I am now very fond of the method and planning to make the next film Yangon Midnight in a similar approach. And I don’t tell the characters what to do exactly, rather I wait for the characters to express themselves eventually and move forward in the film. 

Man with the Beard

KW: Some of the shots in Man with the Beard are incredibly long and often difficult to watch (the scene towards the end where Beard attempts to hang himself springs to mind). There’s a strange, perverse beauty to them and they become almost hypnotic. Do you shoot multiple takes of these long scenes and what do you think a long, single shot can communicate to audiences that short, multiple shots cannot? 

AM: I wanted to pull the viewers into Beard’s life and you can’t do that with multiple, edited shots. These long takes, I usually make a couple of takes in one sitting and we repeat it a couple of days if we need to, then we choose a favourite one. I got the inspiration for long takes from Bela Tarr and Tsai Ming-liang. 

Man with the Beard

KW: Do you think films like Man with the Beard, The Monk and Silence in Mrauk Oo and other contemporary films are steps toward creating a new, authentic national cinema of Myanmar? 

AM: Yes, I think so, but just in the art house scene of Myanmar. It may be important for the future of the Myanmar film scene. 

[Aung Min, interview with author, Sunday 20 December 2020] 

Ultimately, Man with the Beard presents a “deeply personal image of Myanmar, a dark grotesque reflecting the hurt multiethnic soul of Myanmar, injured with the ethnic and religious conflicts and shaken with challenges of new tensions after opening the country.”²⁹ It’s a work that represents a crucial step and a powerful turning point in contemporary Myanmarese cinema for its daring to tell a complicated and painful story in such a confrontational way. 

Three Strangers (Lamin Oo, 2020), 64 minutes, Myanmar, work in progress 

Three Strangers

Another striking example of independent production to emerge in Myanmar in the 2010s is Tagu Films. Formed by childhood friends Lin Sun Oo, Sai Kong Kham and Lamin Oo in 2013, the company originally focussed on commissioned and independent documentaries, with fees from the former providing a funding mechanism for the latter.³⁰ It’s first documentary was the commissioned work This Land is Our Land (Sai Kong Kham, 2013). It focussed on the impact of environmental degradation on three farmers in Shan State and won the prestigious Aung San Suu Kyi Award at International Human Rights and Human Dignity Film Festival in 2014, providing the means of production for Homework (Lamin Oo, 2014), an “an observational snapshot of a family gathering where the father who’s working abroad in Thailand talks to his wife and daughter via video chat while the child does her daily homework in front of a computer.”³¹ It won the Special Mention Award at Wathann Film Festival in 2014. By 2016 Tagu Films produced its first short fiction film, Across The Riverwind (Christopher “Khriz” Chan Nyein, 2016) based on a short story by renown Myanmar author Nay Win Myint. Across the Riverwind tells the story of a working girl who comes across a city boy fishing on her side of the river and won the Best Cinematography Award at Wathann Film Festival 2016. 

But Tagu Films’ most recent work is perhaps its most compelling. Three Strangers is a documentary work in progress which tells the story of a lesbian couple in a remote village in Rakhine State, one of the poorest parts of Myanmar, and their adopted son Phoe Htoo. A long-term relationship has eluded Gwa To, referred to as he/him, until he meets Soe Soe, a singer in a touring troupe, performing in a nearby village. When Gwa To sees Soe Soe singing he is smitten and falls in love.

Three Strangers

A brief courtship ensues and Gwa To and Soe Soe move in together as a couple. But one day, their lives as a couple are turned upside down when Gwa To comes home with two-month-old baby boy Phoe Htoo. Soe Soe initially resists the child, complaining they can barely provide for themselves let alone a baby, but over time, Soe Soe falls in love with their adopted son, and the three strangers form a unique and strong family bond.

The child also serves as a bridge to end the estrangement Gwa To has with his own father, who initially disapproves of two women living together as man and wife, only to have his heart melt with the arrival of Phoe Htoo. The film ends with Phoe Htoo’s entry into a monastery as a novice monk, and the extended family comes together to celebrate the event with joy and pride.

The power of Three Strangers lies in its presentation of an LGBTQI+ story in one of the most culturally and religiously conservative countries in Asia. Discrimination against members of the LGBTQI+ community is commonplace in Myanmar in everyday life and limited public awareness about LGBTQI+ issues only exacerbate the problem. According to director Lamin Oo, “many believe that a person’s sexual orientation is the result of moral transgressions in a previous life. Myanmar does not recognize same-sex marriages or civil unions and transgender people are not allowed to change the gender assign.”³² 

Three Strangers

Improvements in press freedoms that occurred prior to the recent junta lead to more “nuanced and educated media coverage” of LGBTQI+ lives in Myanmar, but the February crackdown and subsequent media blackouts have only served to sever the small amount of progress that has been made not only for LGBTQI+ rights in Myanmar, but for LGBTQI+ equality more broadly.³³

The situation today

At the time of the military takeover in February Three Strangers was still in post-production, however, the film was finished in time for its premiere at the Jogja-NETPAC film festival in Indonesia in late November/early December 2021. But despite this victory, the situation for independent filmmakers in Burma is still relatively dire.

“As far as filmmakers in Burma are concerned, we are all going through a tough time: trying to survive as well as support the revolution,” said one filmmaker on the condition of anonymity. “I can see that many of them [filmmakers] are going about this in many different ways at the moment.”

Another filmmaker said almost everyone hates the military council [the junta], especially young people: “They’re still protesting, and some young people are fighting back against military officers. Ethnic people hate the Myanmar army even more, and they’re fighting back every day.

“All local filmmaking has now officially stopped, but independent filmmakers are shooting in secret,” he said.

What we see in contemporary Myanmarese arthouse cinema is the story of a country grappling with its identity after decades of continuing internal political and religious unrest. It’s also a country with a national cinema that’s opaque, diffuse and still evolving. The surge of new work by emerging filmmakers in the 2010s has been an exciting and promising development, but with the renewed aggression of the military junta against the Myanmarese people, and in particular filmmakers and other artists, the future is uncertain and undeniably grim. While none of the films in this discussion were obviously part or product of Myanmar’s commercial, domestic film industry, the fact they exist at all in a country with such a fragile film industry infrastructure and a draconian censorship system makes them outliers worthy of much attention, both inside Myanmar and out.

References

Eimer, David. 2016. “Myanmar’s once-booming film industry gears up for act two”.    Review in Post Magazine, South China Morning Post    Accessed Wednesday 16 December 2020 https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/film-tv/article/1900617/myanmars-once-booming-film-industry-gears-act-two

Lin, Ko. Tony Neil and Ma Sander. 2021. “In our national interest? Australia’s stance on Myanmar is contradictory, inconsistent, and self-defeating.” ABC Religion and Ethics, July 5, 2021. https://www.abc.net.au/religion/australias-contradictory-stance-on-myanmar/13432226

Ratcliffe, Rebecca. 2021. “Myanmar could become Covid ‘super-spreader’ state, says UN expert.” The Guardian, July 28, 2021. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/28/myanmar-could-become-covid-super-spreader-state-says-un-expert

Endnotes