Directed by Barbet Schroeder
France | 2018 | Documentary | 100 min | Burmese w/ English subtitles
Film Source: Cinema Europe
Sponsors: Kevin Meehan
Followed by Q&A with director Barbet Schroeder via Skype (Sat, Oct 26 only)
The Swiss-French director Barbet Schroeder completes his “Trilogy of Evil” (General Idi Amin Dada: A Self Portait; Terror’s Advocate) with The Venerable W., about a Buddhist monk in Myanmar who uses strong anti-Muslim and anti-Rohingya rhetoric in his speeches and writings. Schroeder’s singular style, as he expressed in an interview with the BBC, is “not to judge those people, but to make them talk and find out more about them and eventually ... give them enough rope to hang themselves." And so, in this film, he relies partly on our ignorance of the conflicts in Myanmar and plays up the noble aspects of Buddhist culture, while gradually letting the monk, Ashin Wirathu, self-indict. In a sense, this is the most terrifying of Schroeder’s portraits, because unlike Amin, for example, we also see Wirthu’s followers through footage culled from phone videos and other immediate media sources. Wirathu represents an awful idea, one that cannot be banished, and one he propagates with chilling skill.?“What was terrifying for me,” said Schroeder, “was my realization that you can meet evil people every day and fail to notice them. It’s not as if there is a big flashing light next to their heads.” The final words of the Buddhist Burmese song at the end of the film — "We'll wall our country with our bones if we have to" — are quite chilling. ~OY