Canadian Premiere
From The Maw Naing comes this bracing political drama — a story of women fighting desperately for their rights. Military coups have defined much of Myanmar’s recent history, and under the current dictatorship violence has driven many young rural citizens from their homes to cities, where their labour is ruthlessly exploited. Naing’s gripping film tells the story of female sweatshop employees who choose to stand up against workplace oppression, striking for two months’ back pay.
From the harshly lit shop floor where the women do their work to the dorm where they make their plans, Naing uses setting to heighten the drama. The glare of fluorescent lighting, the rattling fans, and the rumbling din of sewing machines underscore the harsh conditions of sweatshop labour, and the director plays up the women’s cramped, shadowy living quarters for contrast. This is a dark, unflinching film, but it’s anything but cynical: The violence and oppression these workers face is distressing, but its depiction is meant not to dampen hope but to spark outrage and action.
New Currents Award, Busan 2024
Community Partner
Myanmar/South Korea/Singapore/
France/Norway/Qatar
2024
In Burmese with English subtitles
Book Tickets
Credits & Director
Producer
The Maw Naing, Oh Young Jeong
Screenwriter
Oh Young Jeong
Cinematography
Tin Win Naing
Editor
Nicolas Bancilhon
The Maw Naing
The Maw Naing is a poet, installation artist, and filmmaker born 1971 in Myanmar. His short film Again and Again (2005), based on one of his poems, won the Special Mention Prize at the Zebra Poetry IFF in Berlin, 2008, and his short Between the Pages (2010) has been in the permanent collection at the Fukuoka Art Museum in Japan since 2017. His debut feature film The Monk (2014) premiered at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival and screened 50 times at international film festivals. His second feature, Ma – Cry of Silence (2024), premiered at the Busan International Film Festival.
Filmography: The Monk (2014)
Missing VIFF? Check out what's playing at the VIFF Centre
Turner & Constable
Filmed as a supplement to a blockbuster exhibition at Tate Britain happening right now, this doc in the popular Exhibition on Screen series allows us to view these competitive, complementary English landscape artists side by side.
The President's Cake
Nine year old Lamia and her friend Saeed venture into the city to scrounge ingredients for a cake to celebrate Sadaam Hussein's birthday — a quest fraught with real peril in precarious times. Winner, Camera d'Or, Cannes.
Sinners
2025's unexpected box office sleeper is that rare beast, a genre movie full of bold invention and surprise. We are in Mississippi in the early 1930s, and the opening of a new blues joint on the edge of town is the signal for all hell to break out.
Montreal, ma belle
In this Valentine to discovering love later in life, the ever-elegant Joan Chen plays Feng Xia, a 53-year-old Chinese immigrant and mother in Montreal whose world is turned upside down when she meets and falls in love with a young Quebecoise.
The Secret Agent
Having run afoul of an influential bureaucrat in Brazil’s military dictatorship circa 1977, Marcelo decamps to Recife to live under an assumed name — but he’ll soon come to understand precisely how rampant the country’s corruption has become.