Behind the Screen

A son dissects the marriage of his parents, who were film icons in 1960s Myanmar (then known as Burma). It turns out the heartrending scenes they acted out on the silver screen are a pretty accurate reflection of their real lives. While the camera slides across the glamour photos from their heyday, the filmmaker looks on, entranced. He grapples with the incredible fame of his parents. Now that he is reconstructing their relationship, he sees the old film footage through different eyes – as if it might contain the answers he didn't get as a child, when his parents separated. This merging of family history and film excerpts creates a magical mix of fact and fiction, or – as the son calls it – "the real and the celluloid wedding." The son's public revelation of how things went wrong is an emancipatory act, as divorce is still a big taboo in Myanmar. But the filmmaker doesn't publicly jump onto the barricades. Rather, he keeps things personal, showing the pain caused by the divorce, both for him as a child and for his parents. He also shows how, 50 years ago, ambitions in Myanmar in the area of film were in line with Hollywood: the first film his parents appeared in together was called .